Understanding the impact of object oriented programming and design patterns on energy efficiency

With billions of lines of code being deployed and running on cloud servers, PCs, as well as battery-driven mobile phones, embedded systems, and IoT devices, software energy efficiency will play an increasingly important role in green IT. In the past decades, object oriented programming (OOP) has become the de facto standard for commercial software design. However, very little is known about the impact of OOP and design patterns on software energy efficiency. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on a series of OOP features and design patterns and find out that their influences on performance and energy efficiency vary greatly. Some of them have negligible impact while others could degrade performance and increase energy consumption. If used appropriately, design patterns can also help improve performance and reduce energy consumption.