Energy consumption of evolutionary algorithms implemented in low-level languages
Juan Julián Merelo, Mario García-Valdéz, G. Romero · 2025
In this paper, we focus on how the main operations in evolutionary algorithms spend energy in two different languages: C++ and zig. By setting up a methodology that gives us a precise measure of the energy spent by key evolutionary algorithm functions, we can give the scientific software engineer some actionable insights on how to write energy-conscious evolutionary algorithms. Our experiments show that C++ using the well-known GNU compiler can achieve a 50% reduction in energy consumption for some integer-based fitness functions, as well as very good performance on classical genetic operators.