Type Systems in Resource-Aware Programming: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper explores how type systems can be used to improve energy awareness and efficiency in programming, highlighting current limitations and proposing future directions for practical integration.

Contribution

It identifies gaps in existing energy-aware type systems and discusses how they can support energy-efficient refactoring, outlining requirements for practical adoption.

Findings

Current type systems lack comprehensive energy-awareness features.

Existing approaches do not fully address practical energy consumption measurement.

Type systems can potentially facilitate energy-efficient code refactoring.

Abstract

Type systems provide software developers immediate feedback about a subset of correctness properties of their programs. IDE integrations often take advantage of type systems to present errors, suggest completions and even improve navigation. On the other hand, understanding the time and energy consumption of the execution of a program requires manual testing. In this paper, we identify existing work on using type systems for energy awareness, and define the requirements for a practical approach, which the existing approaches do not address fully. Furthermore, we also discuss how existing type systems can help generalize refactors for energy-efficiency.