Type Systems in Resource-Aware Programming: Opportunities and Challenges

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.