Great to see they support and still use Perl. Geizhals is a very usable and functional product and price comparison page. Looks a little bit old, but that is exactly what I like. Geizhals is associated with the Heise Verlag, that is what I do not like so much, because there was a steady decline in quality in the recent years.
Haters will say a major factor in still using Perl is the difficulty to replace up to 25+ years old Perl code written at startup pace AND the difficulty to teach old Perl devs a new language.
I check this site several times to get an idea what is the market price of something in the real world (i.e. outside Amazon).
Also, it’s very good at keeping tabs on the features of some products (best place I found to compare motherboards per features, something surprisingly difficult to do).
Unfortunately it’s very German centric and I live in Portugal, so I’ve only actually bought something from a link I’ve got there once.
It’s hard to believe that 10k is worth whatever they need from Perl in 2025.
I wrote Perl for many years while I worked on the godforsaken cmecf system.
Cmecf this year announced it had been hacked by Russian hackers.
This means that cmecf written in Perl allowed a country access to Federal Court evidence including intelligence gathering methods, corporate secrets, and inside sources.
Perl is not memory safe, loaded with security issues for over a decade. It’s only saving grace is string manipulation, which is exactly why the best hackers in the world all know it.
Was the bug in Perl or its libraries, or in the code written in Perl? There are many valid criticisms of Perl, but I've never heard of the language itself described as insecure, and especially not memory-unsafe. I don't know how I'd write a use-after-free or stack smash in Perl if I were forced to.
You must have confused Perl with another programming language. Perl has always been a memory-managed language with a reference-counted garbage collector.
The link you posted doesn't even mention Perl at all. It does say that:
Using a memory safe language can help prevent programmers from introducing certain types of memory-related issues. Memory is managed automatically as part of the computer language; it does not rely on the programmer adding code to implement memory protections.
Perl clearly fits the definition of a memory-safe language with automatic memory management. The funny thing is that this document lists Delphi/Object Pascal as memory-safe languages, even though there are clearly not.
I only knew of one company with some kind of techie fandom primarily using Perl before reading this (Fastmail out of Melbourne, Australia). Now I know of two.
Still, two is a small number. And we're probably talking about like 20 Perl developers in total across these two companies (just having looked at their total employee counts).
My go-to use case for modern Perl is to be the default program instead of sed. Sed regex support is abysmal and the same command line flags behave differently between BSD (and macOS) and GNU versions, in particular the `-i` for doing replacements - the number one use case for the program. So, this means that many shell one-liners and small scripts don't really work the same way on macOS and on Linux, and it's pretty annoying.
Perl is straight up better. You need to remember one word: pie - for it's command line options, and now you can do:
First of all, it woks the same way across platforms.
Second, you get all sorts of goodies: named capture groups, lookahead and lookbehind matching, unicode, you can write multiline regexes using extended syntax if you do something complicated.
And finally, if your shell script needs some logic: functions, ifs, or loops, Perl is straight up better than Bash. Some of you will say "I'll do it in Python", and I agree. But if your script is mostly calling other tools like git, find, make, etc, then Perl like Bash can just call them in backticks instead of wrapping things into arrays and strings. It just reads better.
BTW Ruby can do it, too, so it's another good option.
>It's extremely stable, ... It's a shame it's so dead,
The former is the consequence of the later. Popularity kills stability. Perl is the ultimate sysadmin language because it's so portable and never changes. We really lucked out with the Raku thing driving people away to python. Because of it my perl scripts I wrote in 2003 run on perl system interpreter today and the vast majority of my perl written today would run on a 2006 perl interpreter (some functions missing in some libs in troublemakers like Gtk bindings, etc), but it's generally very good.
These days with python you can't even run any random script written today on your system python from today. You have to set up an entire separate python for every script. And don't even think about trying to run a python script from 2006. That's what popularity does: fracture.
At my work we use perl extensively for utility scripts and such. In the past few years there has been a push to write new scripts in python, but I don't really see the point. It has most of the same drawbacks that perl has: 30x slower than a compiled language and dynamic typing.
We have many scripts that range from 5.8 to 5.36 and everything in between. 5.8 is 20 years old. Someone did a search & replace on the shebang lines to move all the older ones to 5.20 (why they picked that one, I don't know) and everything just continued to work.
I prefer perl over python. turn on use strict, use warnings FATAL => 'all' and use modern function signatures. Perl is still great for its purpose.
It's stable, installed everywhere, and I use programs written in Perl like when building Linux From Scratch. I haven't written in Perl since the 1990s. I do read code written in Perl and Raku, and I am often impressed by how succinct the code can be.
There is a problem somewhere deep in capitalist economies. The model has served humanity well - from Napoleon to Neo-Liberal the world has seen vaccines, space flight, farming revolutions and sewage plants giving longer better life to billions.
But … OSS is like a bellwether - the foundations of this great wealth need investment and maintenance else we build on rotting timbers.
And when a major global e-commerce platform chucks a few Weeks salary of a junior developer in SV and we call it worth mentioning, we need to find a new way to shore up those foundations.
I don’t have a good answer - I suspect I need to look deeper at the real problem - but it does seem to be a real problem
The model we have works for used packages. If a package is used by a large company and requires maintenance, the company pays its engineers to do it, and the rest of us receive the updates for free due to the license.
However, the system breaks down for packages that are not used by major companies (or are stable and safe enough to avoid triggering an alarm).
There is no viable way to fund continuous support for every forgotten open-source project.
Geizhals is powering heise compilate, the affiliate/revenue generating platform for the heise publishing house. Basically, it allows you to add prices for products or categories to websites, competing with the "shop this on amazon" affiliate links if websites want to give customers different options than amazon.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadAfaik, Heise Verlag is the owner of Geizhals
Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.
yup
Also, it’s very good at keeping tabs on the features of some products (best place I found to compare motherboards per features, something surprisingly difficult to do).
Unfortunately it’s very German centric and I live in Portugal, so I’ve only actually bought something from a link I’ve got there once.
I wrote Perl for many years while I worked on the godforsaken cmecf system.
Cmecf this year announced it had been hacked by Russian hackers.
This means that cmecf written in Perl allowed a country access to Federal Court evidence including intelligence gathering methods, corporate secrets, and inside sources.
Perl is not memory safe, loaded with security issues for over a decade. It’s only saving grace is string manipulation, which is exactly why the best hackers in the world all know it.
Perl is memory safe.
> loaded with security issues for over a decade.
According to CVE reports, it doesn't appear that Perl [0] is less secure than Python [1]:
[0]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/1885/Perl.html
[1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/10210/Python.html
I’m amazed that you are defending that Perl is memory safe.
It’s not.
The link you posted doesn't even mention Perl at all. It does say that:
Using a memory safe language can help prevent programmers from introducing certain types of memory-related issues. Memory is managed automatically as part of the computer language; it does not rely on the programmer adding code to implement memory protections.
Perl clearly fits the definition of a memory-safe language with automatic memory management. The funny thing is that this document lists Delphi/Object Pascal as memory-safe languages, even though there are clearly not.
Still, two is a small number. And we're probably talking about like 20 Perl developers in total across these two companies (just having looked at their total employee counts).
It's extremely stable, installed almost everywhere, and has much fewer insane idosyncrasies than shell.
I can write some Perl and confidently hand it to a colleague where it will almost certainly work on their machine.
It's a shame it's so dead, for a scripting language there's nothing else that ticks the same boxes.
I would never write systems software with it, of course
Perl is straight up better. You need to remember one word: pie - for it's command line options, and now you can do:
First of all, it woks the same way across platforms.Second, you get all sorts of goodies: named capture groups, lookahead and lookbehind matching, unicode, you can write multiline regexes using extended syntax if you do something complicated.
And finally, if your shell script needs some logic: functions, ifs, or loops, Perl is straight up better than Bash. Some of you will say "I'll do it in Python", and I agree. But if your script is mostly calling other tools like git, find, make, etc, then Perl like Bash can just call them in backticks instead of wrapping things into arrays and strings. It just reads better.
BTW Ruby can do it, too, so it's another good option.
The former is the consequence of the later. Popularity kills stability. Perl is the ultimate sysadmin language because it's so portable and never changes. We really lucked out with the Raku thing driving people away to python. Because of it my perl scripts I wrote in 2003 run on perl system interpreter today and the vast majority of my perl written today would run on a 2006 perl interpreter (some functions missing in some libs in troublemakers like Gtk bindings, etc), but it's generally very good.
These days with python you can't even run any random script written today on your system python from today. You have to set up an entire separate python for every script. And don't even think about trying to run a python script from 2006. That's what popularity does: fracture.
I think Python ticks almost all the same boxes (and is much better designed in my opinion).
We have many scripts that range from 5.8 to 5.36 and everything in between. 5.8 is 20 years old. Someone did a search & replace on the shebang lines to move all the older ones to 5.20 (why they picked that one, I don't know) and everything just continued to work.
I prefer perl over python. turn on use strict, use warnings FATAL => 'all' and use modern function signatures. Perl is still great for its purpose.
But … OSS is like a bellwether - the foundations of this great wealth need investment and maintenance else we build on rotting timbers.
And when a major global e-commerce platform chucks a few Weeks salary of a junior developer in SV and we call it worth mentioning, we need to find a new way to shore up those foundations.
I don’t have a good answer - I suspect I need to look deeper at the real problem - but it does seem to be a real problem
However, the system breaks down for packages that are not used by major companies (or are stable and safe enough to avoid triggering an alarm).
There is no viable way to fund continuous support for every forgotten open-source project.
Glad to see them giving back to the community and hoping that they remain in this marker so Idealo has some competition.
Link in German: https://compaliate.heise.de/