A Controlled Experiment on the Energy Efficiency of the Source Code Generated by Code Llama

TL;DR

This study empirically evaluates the energy efficiency of source code generated by Code Llama across different programming languages and prompts, revealing that generated code often underperforms human-written code in energy efficiency.

Contribution

The paper provides the first objective assessment of Code Llama's energy efficiency, highlighting language and problem dependence, and showing prompts do not reliably improve efficiency.

Findings

Human code is generally more energy efficient than generated code.

JavaScript generated by Code Llama can outperform human JavaScript in energy efficiency.

Prompting Code Llama for energy-efficient code does not consistently improve energy efficiency.

Abstract

Context. Nowadays, 83% of software developers use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code. LLMs recently became essential to increase the productivity of software developers and decrease the time and cost of software development. Developers ranging from novices to experts use LLM tools not only to detect and patch bugs, but also to integrate generated code into their software. However, as of today there is no objective assessment of the energy efficiency of the source code generated by LLM tools. Released in August 2023, Code Llama is one of the most recent LLM tools. Goal. In this paper, we present an empirical study that assesses the energy efficiency of Code Llama with respect to human-written source code. Method. We design an experiment involving three human-written benchmarks implemented in C++, JavaScript, and Python. We ask Code Llama to generate the code of the benchmarks using different prompts and temperatures. Therefore, we execute both implementations and profile their energy efficiency. Results. Our study shows that the energy efficiency of code generated by Code Llama is heavily-dependent on the chosen programming language and the specific code problem at hand. Also, human implementations tend to be more energy efficient overall, with generated JavaScript code outperforming its human counterpart. Moreover, explicitly asking Code Llama to generate energy-efficient code results in an equal or worse energy efficiency, as well as using different temperatures seems not to affect the energy efficiency of generated code. Conclusions. According to our results, code generated using Code Llama does not guarantee energy efficiency, even when prompted to do so. Therefore, software developers should evaluate the energy efficiency of generated code before integrating it into the software system under development.