As the global economy sets its sights on decarbonization, the software industry is coming under increasing scrutiny. Green Software Foundation, with its mission to standardize industry best practices for sustainable software development, is here to help.
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Good coding practices for performance and efficiency have been part of software engineering since the earliest days. “When we were programming mainframes, every character counted,” says Sanjay Podder, chair of Green Software Foundation, an organization that aims to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for green software.
But over the past few decades, the overwhelming need for speed and productivity pushed architectural efficiency concerns to the background. Computers that piggyback on vast libraries with extraneous lines of code, developers who have lost count of the number of virtual machines they have spun off — all add drag and increase the carbon emissions related to software. These emissions include both the energy …