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.
whiteboardr · 1h ago
Username checks out : )
Asmod4n · 1h ago
They had some very recent UI overhauls, it looks more friendly now.
nik736 · 43m ago
More friendly, less usable
pixelpoet · 27m ago
Yeah I'm hugely frustrated by their recent updates that hide / obfuscate the filters, which is basically the main way you want to use the site. I'm pretty sure it's yet another casualty of optimising for phone normies :(
sjn · 10m ago
I agree! The filters made be go to the site, and I don't even live in any of the markets they serve! (Though I do visit, and sometimes buy tings based on what I've found through the site).
Asmod4n · 9m ago
Hm, I only miss one thing, sorting by price with shipping cost. Can’t see anything else that was removed, just changed.
the_mitsuhiko · 6m ago
> Hm, I only miss one thing, sorting by price with shipping cost.
Not sure if that's missing on the international site, but if you select "inkl. Versand" in the filter box then the sort includes shipping.
franticgecko3 · 23m ago
I've started learning (in 2025!) and using Perl lately as shell++
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
Why is this news? Because it's so little? 10K will pay a developer for 2 months maybe ..
mrweasel · 39m ago
The Perl Foundation has a goal to get more smaller donations, rather than a few large ones and it seems like they've been doing okay lately.
You're probably correct that this could better be summed up later in the year as one single news item. In terms of getting publicity and attracting more donation, announcing and discussing each "small" donation might be better.
a1371 · 21m ago
I was impressed to see at the new keynote that Blender is successfully shifting its revenue growth to small donations. So it can be done.
colesantiago · 22m ago
This is better than nothing at all?
I've seen many promising and still in use open source languages and projects that barely even get $500 a month in contributions.
Yet these projects have added value in the millions to startups that never give back to these projects because $500-$1000 a month is 'too expensive' for them.
tosh · 1h ago
did not know (or forgot) that they were using Perl
Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.
amiga386 · 42m ago
See also the little-known website Booking.com
wtcactus · 1h ago
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.
gjvc · 1h ago
"Geizhals Preisvergleich began in July of 1997 as a hobby project—and yes, “Geizhals” literally translates to “skinflint” in English"
yup
lifeisstillgood · 18m ago
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
whatever1 · 14m ago
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.
Aldipower · 15m ago
On the flip side, freedom is related to independence. If a company would heavily fund the Perl society or another FOSS, it would become dependent and loosing it's freedom. Freedom is something you cannot count or measure with capitalist thinking, but it does not mean there is no value to it.
tdhz77 · 49m ago
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.
kstrauser · 3m ago
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.
Aldipower · 41m ago
Perl is not memory safe? Are there pointers directly to memory like in C? No, it is an interpreted language that runs opcode in the Perl virtual machine.
Sure, there are quite some safety concerns with Perl, but they can be mitigated.
For example there is the taint mode with "-T" that prevents direct execution of system commands.
Would I use Perl for a new project? No. :-)
I would be interested in more details about the cmecf hack!?
Not sure if that's missing on the international site, but if you select "inkl. Versand" in the filter box then the sort includes shipping.
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
You're probably correct that this could better be summed up later in the year as one single news item. In terms of getting publicity and attracting more donation, announcing and discussing each "small" donation might be better.
I've seen many promising and still in use open source languages and projects that barely even get $500 a month in contributions.
Yet these projects have added value in the millions to startups that never give back to these projects because $500-$1000 a month is 'too expensive' for them.
Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.
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.
yup
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.
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.
Sure, there are quite some safety concerns with Perl, but they can be mitigated. For example there is the taint mode with "-T" that prevents direct execution of system commands.
Would I use Perl for a new project? No. :-)
I would be interested in more details about the cmecf hack!?