Performance and energy-efficiency of scala on mobile devices

The objective of this study was to compare how new languages like Scala perform on mobile environments compared to the classical languages. Since Scala also runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it is possible to run the code on Android devices and compare it with Java. After analysing the existing literature about Scala-Java comparisons, and after finding what constitutes a good benchmark for our subject of study, we found and adapted two benchmarks for both Scala and Java and ran them on an Android device. We measured the power consumption and the execution time of the benchmarks, as well as the memory usage and the size of the application. The results show that using Scala in mobile devices is feasible. Scala performs faster or slower than Java, depending on the task, and on average it consumes more energy than Java on the Android device, while using less memory. The size of the application written in Scala is also larger due to the presence of the Scala libraries.