I am sure we are all grateful for Proxmox's generous donation; but if €10k is newsworthy for a Foundation with Perl's historic profile, I would be very worried.
oalders · 5h ago
Fundraising is hard. There's a longer history around it that I don't have the space to fully explore here, but the quick version is that I'm currently looking for more sponsors in this 10k range rather than having to rely on 100k donations from very large orgs.
Some companies immediately understand the value of this kind of support. Getting that news out will hopefully allow me to find more orgs who can/will donate in this range.
So, if anyone has any leads, please do contact me: olaf@perlfoundation.org If you take a close look at your stack, you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.
bmn__ · 5h ago
Then be worried. That amount is a quarter of the foundation's yearly revenue.
oofbey · 3h ago
Part of me wants to go send Perl some money, because it was so important in my formative years. Another part of me is like "people still use perl?"
systems · 2h ago
Raku is now a completely separate language from Perl
and I think that while Perl still seem to be used, Raku usage is even smaller
I am really impressed of how Raku developers keep their motivation to work on it
And I am a bit curious to know if Proxmox is interested in Raku at all, or are they only using Perl
m463 · 2h ago
proxmox is heavily based on perl
...and when looking through the sources, I thought <the proxmox folks> "still use perl?"
I guess proxmox IS 17 years old...
baq · 5h ago
we live in a world where it's easier to burn $10M for a repackaged chatgpt than to have someone wire $10k for a core infrastructure project. sad reality, but reality still.
if you're motivated to do OSS work, the best bet is to figure out how to take VC money to do that and don't end up on some blacklist.
77pt77 · 3h ago
Just look at OpenSSL.
How important it is, how much it's used and the money they get.
markoman · 6h ago
Shouldn't their donation be weighed against the revenues they enjoy using the Foundation's labors? Is Proxmox enjoying particularly strong revenues, and doesn't their product involve much more than what Perl provides? I think the donation is pretty fair. Their success certainly owes more to things beyond Perl itself.
rcxdude · 5h ago
I think the point is proxmox's donation is fair, but there's many more businesses getting much more value from perl which are not donating, if their fair donation is notable.
whatevaa · 5h ago
Donations are donations. Can't expect them.
systemswizard · 3h ago
Proxmox had made other donations like they were a platinum sponsor at debconf25 and that’s $20k
axus · 5h ago
VMware has certainly extracted more dollars from me than ProxMox has.
It's nice when companies contribute fixes and testing up-stream, even when it's not a monetary contribution.
exiguus · 13m ago
In many projects you can get Silver Sponsor Status with 10k.
0xbadcafebee · 5h ago
Or, be inspired that it proves there's business value in supporting the foundation? They wouldn't spend thousands of euros if they thought it was going down the drain.
slavik81 · 3h ago
Proxmox were also a platinum sponsor at DebConf25 last week, which is at least €20K.
MDGeist · 4h ago
Kind of wondered if that was part of the rationale for making it news. Maybe another company will say "that's all!? we can do better" and help out.
regularjack · 3h ago
This thread has more than 100 comments, so seems it is indeed newsworthy.
FirmwareBurner · 5h ago
>but if €10k is newsworthy
Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based on my experience here: That just shows you how broke EU tech companies are that even 10k is newsworthy for them.
For context, I only worked for average (not big-tech/unicorns) EU/French/Dutch/German tech companies my whole life and I was shocked to see how much more, the average US tech companies spend on frivolities(forget the wages) than the European companies I worked at.
From what I saw, for US tech companies big or small, buying fully decked MacBooks and Herman Miler chairs for their SW devs was the norm, while I only saw the discount bin chairs and base spec HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops wherever I worked here.
Even where I work now, SW engineers get the same crappy HP notebooks that HR uses to read emails, since beancounters love fleets of the same cheap laptops for everyone, so my manager needs to jump through hoops for the beancounters to let him order more powerful notebooks for the SW engineers in his team, cause ya' know, Docker and VMs eat more resources than Outlook and Excel. This is relatively unheard of for US SW engineers where little expense is spared on equipment.
They even reduced costs related to facility management like AC runtime and cleaning services, so trash bins are emptied twice a week instead of daily, leading to some funny office aromas in summer, if you catch my drift. And of course, they blame Putin for this.
I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy.
My explanation is, European companies are just run the same way EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting, so instead of trying to make money by innovating and investing and splurging to get the best of everything, they instead try to increase the profits by cutting all possible costs from purchasing to labors' wages and offshoring, since I assume that's also what's taught in European MBA schools.
CJefferson · 4h ago
How many US companies are donating more than 10k to perl? Or even that much?
If your anti-EU rant is right, open source projects should just naturally come into a whole bunch of donations this size from these rich US companies. Does that happen? Especially once we get past the big 3?
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
>your anti-EU rant
How is it anti-EU? I was explaining what I observed, nothing what I said has to do with the EU political union, but with the way EU companies operate. Criticizing the way European companies choose to do business doesn't make you "anti-EU".
What's with this hyper-partisan George-Bush-style "You're either with us or against us" type of arguments, where you can't criticize something without someone accusing you of being a hater?
Can't we just debate things reasonably and assuming good faith as per HN rules, instead of resorting to attacks and accusations of partisan?
NeutralForest · 5h ago
I don't think it's unpopular, I'm European and it's sad to see the tech scene and the kind of capital we have available, compared to the US.
tlamponi · 4h ago
Note that Proxmox did not put out any news, the Perl foundation did, and that is based in the USA, so not sure if it really shows what you try to suggest.
tristor · 42m ago
> I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy.
It's actually almost the opposite here in the US. Because labor is expensive, especially engineering labor, it doesn't make sense to scrimp on expenses like computer equipment or office chairs that support that labor, as you want to reduce development costs. If a faster laptop costs $500/unit more but reduces toil/wasted time for a $300k/yr developer of 30 minutes a day, it is easily justified that it's worth the cost since labor cost is so much higher.
Perz1val · 5h ago
Is this an opinion or the actual state of things?
poisonborz · 4h ago
I can attest that this is the case, worked in a number of countries there.
alecco · 5h ago
Donations are against "maximize shareholder value" and other directives by the high lords of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.
eddythompson80 · 5h ago
I don’t think you know what BlackRock, Vanguard, or State Street are.
Analemma_ · 5h ago
This isn't accidental, it's malicious enemy action. Overpaid fund managers are sick of seeing their business walk out the door in favor of funds with low/no fees, so there's a very active submarine campaign in progress to make BlackRock, Vanguard etc. seem like mustache-twirling villains, instead of "just a bunch of people owning shares".
For example, note how all the stories about institutional investors buying up housing stock mention BlackRock, even though REITs and private equity firms are doing much, much more of this business.
hylaride · 4h ago
Also, Vanguard is run as a sort of cooperative where it is indirectly owned by the fundholders, which is why they were always incentivized to LOWER fees. The founder of Vanguard (Jack Bogle) probably left tens of billions of wealth on the table by creating that model (and he had no regrets, FWIW).
There are concerns because by default they usually cast votes by board recommendations and since they have such a huge stewardship of the stock market it means others can have more direct influence, but Vanguard itself is otherwise as neutral a stock ownership intermediary as can pretty much exist.
eddythompson80 · 4h ago
It’s especially sad when you read or listen to what Jack Bogle had to say. Such a thoughtful, kind and honest person who choose to help people invest rather than pocket their money. But the modern financial system is too complex for your average moron.
0x457 · 3h ago
I can't say much about State Street, but lumping BlackRock and Vanguard into the same category tells me that you don't know much.
eddythompson80 · 2h ago
BlackRock and State Street biggest funds are all passive and are indistinguishable from Vanguard. All 3 offer active investments, but their passive portfolio dwarfs the active ones.
BlackRock != BlackStone, if that’s what you were thinking of.
0x457 · 1h ago
Well, no. I was talking about BlackRock and Vanguard passive funds.
eddythompson80 · 1h ago
Then enlighten me about the, presumably, massive difference between BlackRock and Vanguard passive funds. It must be something so huge that they are both in the index fund/passive fund category and yet “can’t be lumped together” because it seems you’re the one who doesn’t know much.
ChosenEnd · 5h ago
What are they?
rcxdude · 4h ago
They hold shared on behalf of other people, i.e. if someone buys one of their index funds they buy the corresponding shares. They are the on-paper owner of a very large fraction of shares in public companies, but they are a) not the ultimate owners, just agents of the real investors, and b) as a consequence very hands-off in the operation of the businessness. They in general just go along with what the company executives and other, more direct investors want. They have a general stated goal of 'encouraging long-term value for their stockholders', but the most activist thing they've done was contribute to a shuffle in exxonmobile which pushed them to pay a little bit more attention to the environment and climate change, which is if anything the opposite of what people tend to assume they do.
BobaFloutist · 3h ago
I mean they also send me an email to vote with my fractional S&P 500 shares whenever a shareholder vote comes up, so even if they're the on-paper owner of the shares they seem to pass through the voting rights every bit as much as the direct value and dividends.
bluGill · 3h ago
You are probably voting for the ownership of the fund, and not the companies the fund owns. Unless you get around 500 different share holder vote forms every year you are not voting for the companies in question you are just voting for the leaders of your funds. (around 500 because S&P 500 funds often buy companies like what is in the S&P500, but not always exactly the same companies. Even if they want to be exactly the same companies they take time to buy and sell anytime the S&P500 changes just because the market could not handle them buying/selling everything the minute the S&P list changes)
_zoltan_ · 5h ago
that's literally every corporation's job. hate to break it to you.
also proxmox is German.
rcxdude · 4h ago
Only in very high-level, abstract terms. Company executives have, especially of publically owned companies, a very large degree of leeway in how they can operate, and most corporations do have some idea of a mission beyond 'make money'.
grantla · 4h ago
> also proxmox is German.
Austrian, please.
AgentMatrixAI · 6h ago
Been using proxmox for a home lab and I still can't believe how much value they provide for free.
I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552 and clone a full VM with it".
I use it for DevOps at work and it’s just wonderful. The data center features alone are worth the license fees .. but what I like most of all is how easy it makes managing ZFS pools.
pphysch · 6h ago
To be fair, Proxmox is essentially a UX wrapper around QEMU/KVM, which is free software and the true kernel of value. If you are going the MCP route I wonder if a direct QEMU or libvirt MCP server would be much more powerful and precise.
tlamponi · 6h ago
While UI/UX is–as probably everywhere–a huge topic, we actually have spent most engineering power in the whole management stack. And of that managing QEMU/KVM–while surely significant–is by far not the biggest part of our also 100% free and open source code bases. I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to containers, backups including third party and our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST API with full permission management and modern access control.
And we naturally try to contribute to every project we use however possible, be it in the form of patches, QA, detailed bug reports, ... and especially for QEMU et al. we're pretty content with our impact, at least compared to resources of other companies leveraging it, I think.
If all it'd take is being "just" a simple UI wrapper, it would make lots of things way easier for us :-)
pphysch · 4h ago
> I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to containers, backups including third party and our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST API with full permission management and modern access control.
This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't exist as a mature option.
Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
tlamponi · 3h ago
> This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't exist as a mature option.
The feature set of Kubernetes and Proxmox VE do not really overlap completely IMO, or would need much more hands-on approach and specialized in-house staff to set up and maintain, why go for that if you can do everything one need with much less headache.
As the former needs much more dedicated management and maintenance resources and is often pulling in more complexity than most need, but there one needs also to differentiate from those developing and releasing their own applications and being fine with what e.g. kubernetes offers, quite possibly even wanting that, compared to those e.g. providing infrastructure for internal use or just favoring more monolithic applications, often boils down to taste and what one is comfortable with. Our enterprise customers are very diverse, from small shops with two or three node clusters to host the office infra to five digit hosts and 6 digits VMs spread out. We even know a few setups using Proxmox VE as basis for their Kubernetes cluster.
Finally, PVE is quite a bit older than Kubernetes, we still exist and see a lot of adoption (already before the Broadcom deal, albeit there was an uptick since then), so even without some technical comparison of features or use cases or the like it seems clear that Kubernetes isn't an alternative for all, just like Proxmox VE certainly isn't one.
> Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
One should not confuse being very popular in the home lab scene due to being very approachable, simple to set up, and most importantly 100% FLOSS, not just open core or the like, with it being the main or target audience, but we're really happy with the synergies it provides.
And actually I'd not frame it as bad thing that Proxmox VE is used that way, we do not want to be a club that is hard to access, neither cost wise nor hindering scaling smaller VM labs to bigger setups, and certainly not from a complexity barrier.
pphysch · 3h ago
Kubernetes also has off-the-shelf distros that are more apples-to-apples with Proxmox VE.
Let's not pretend that Proxmox or any of these are silver bullets that kill the (inherent) complexity demon. Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and standalone QEMU.
tlamponi · 2h ago
Kill? no, definitively not. But 1) not adding a lot of extra and 2) applying the Pareto principle here are a huge difference. I.e. making the essential parts approachable enough to get one started while not being blocked too much by upfront (steep) learning curve, while not blocking one later by limiting one to just the predefined path.
> Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
There are widely different level of expertise needed though, and the setups that often are managed by admins with not in-depth expertise in clustering or SDN can still get things done with Proxmox VE, and if they are out of idea we got our enterprise support and naturally also the very active and friendly community forum to help.
> Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and standalone QEMU.
Yeah, I really do not get that point, you basically invalidate 95% of Proxmox VE's feature set because it might not be fully leveraged by a specific user group and because there are some different solutions that also allow one to do similar things. That would also invalidate Kubernetes, it's not completely unpopular in small labs either after all.
To be honest, to me, it feels a bit to me like a justification attempt for the initial post in this chain here that brushed off Proxmox VE as just some small UI/UX wrapper around QEMU/KVM and all the Real Work™ being done by others, possibly because you never actually used it, but I might read it the wrong way, and I'm certainly not offended in any way, just find it a bit odd.
No comments yet
ahofmann · 2h ago
Have you used proxmox? It makes stuff easy, that was really complicated before proxmox entered the stage.
qualeed · 3h ago
You started with saying it was "essentially a UX wrapper", it was explained that there is a lot more to it, so you immediately shift into (paraphrased) "well there's other options and most people don't use the other features anyways".
Would have been cool of you to just say "oh neat, I didn't realize that you did all that too".
pphysch · 3h ago
Do you really think people are using Proxmox MCP servers to administer mission-critical distributed computing systems that leverage SDN and clustered storage, rather than small VM labs? Because that was not my assumption.
qualeed · 3h ago
That's very much not the point I was making, at all.
There could be tons! Or not many. It's completely irrelevant to my comment.
phil21 · 4h ago
> Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
In my little world this largely was true until Broadcom bought VMware and proceeded to blow it up.
I know of a handful of rather “large” (100s of physical servers at least) VMware based products that are as quickly as possible migrating to proxmox.
Given how universal this is for my little slice of IT, I imagine this is quite pervasive for the “mid tier” VMware organization.
AgentMatrixAI · 5h ago
While you could do that, proxmox offers lot of value with its UI which I need to default to time to time. With just an API key I generate from proxmox I have a wide range of capability that I can hook up an MCP server to.
The funny thing is with Cursor I can just generate a new capability, like the clone and template actions were created after asking Sonnet 4.
SparkyMcUnicorn · 6h ago
Proxmox has a UI and a bunch of APIs so I don't need to rebuild them myself, and maintains everything quite well (all major upgrades I've done have been pretty seamless). Proxmox is definitely an easy path, and you still have root access for drawing outside the lines.
placardloop · 5h ago
This is true for the act of launching VMs, but it’s pretty reductive towards the entire suite of important features that Proxmox provides like clustering, high availability, integration with various storage backends, backups, and more that qemu doesn’t.
0xbadcafebee · 5h ago
I mean, that's actually not being fair... It's like saying Windows is just a UX wrapper around a microkernel. There is quite a bit of functionality provided by that wrapper.
Spivak · 5h ago
Calling Proxmox a wrapper for KVM is hilarious, you're ignoring that Proxmox does all the work to make a functional cluster of VM servers including stuff like shared storage and live migrations and networking. If you only use Proxmox on a single server with local storage then I could see how you would say this but having a fleet of VMs on a cluster of servers where you can take down physical hosts to patch transparently is the "hard problem."
mort96 · 4h ago
It's an annoying thing common to a lot of technologists. They (we?) see a product which solves a problem, then imagine some hacky way to set up existing tools to half-way solve a similar problem in an easy but incomplete way, then make fun of the product for existing when the hacky solution exists. The Hacker News comment on Docker's announcement post comes to mind, where a person makes fun of the concept when you could "just" run rsync in a cron job.
Melonai · 2h ago
I think you might mean Dropbox, but your point still stands.
it's not. their SDN built on frr and vxlan is itself a complex piece that has been missing from the free space (integrated as a package).
trallnag · 6h ago
What do you use all these VMs for in your homelab? I've dabbled with Proxmox in the past but settled on plain Ubuntu for my home server that I now treat as a pet managed with Ansible.
zamadatix · 2h ago
For me Proxmox is mainly a means to be able to have more than 1 pet (partially for simplicity's sake of not having to make everything play well together in the same install, partially because I have some things which require Windows and some things which require Ubuntu).
I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running at the same time.
SparkyMcUnicorn · 6h ago
Take your pick. Everyone wants different things. This site/repo is pretty great.
I personally self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and my household. Nextcloud for my phone, mattermost for in-house communication, private wordpress as a multimedia diary, a bunch of experiments, wekan for organization, network storage, network printer.
I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.
nickthegreek · 3h ago
immich, n8n, openwebui, metube, hoarder, gethomepage, freshrss, tailscale, reverse proxy, on and on it goes.
trallnag · 3h ago
I do that with containers running on a single-node Kubernetes cluster (k3s). Doing it via the Proxmox UI feels like I'm giving up "control". Maybe that's just because doing it with Kubernetes etc. is closer to how I'd do it at work.
AgentMatrixAI · 6h ago
it gives me a direct bridge from cursor -> VM, for local dev & test out open source projects
I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it.
So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.
nickdothutton · 3h ago
Most management has no idea of the importance of the open source building blocks that their business rests upon. Similarly they cannot begin to conceive of the benefits of making a donation. Probably the most effective thing you could do is to somehow attempt to copy the "greenwashing" effect of companies being environmentally responsible, and having an environmental section to their annual reports. "The health of the open source ecosystem is essential to sustainable research, development, and operations at ACME Corp. This year we have sponsored the following...for our current and future benefit".
bluGill · 3h ago
I've long tried to figure out how we can donate to projects. If we were to buy/license those tools it would cost thousands of dollars, but I don't know how to get any money for the free tools we use. When I ask half of management doesn't understand the question, and the rest don't know either.
petdance · 1h ago
Can you dedicate employee time to help on the projects?
kblissett · 6h ago
I wish more companies would do this. €10k is a cheap price to pay for some great exposure and goodwill!
uncertainrhymes · 5h ago
Even though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were many companies happily using it for free and still demanding security updates.
I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens.
Also sponsorship of community conferences/meetups for OSS software.
lordofgibbons · 6h ago
Are people still using Perl for new software?
I remember at a former company, we had a major migration away from Perl 12 years ago. The Perl code base was considered extremely ancient even back then.
G3rn0ti · 6h ago
I am working for a company maintaining an enterprise grade software system that is primarily driven by Perl 5 and Postgres. It generates about EUR 50 million in revenue every year.
To avoid creating new Perl code from scratch we created a REST API many years ok which new frontends and middlewares use instead of interacting with the core itself. That has been successful to some extent as we can have frontend teams coding in JS/TypeScript without them needing to interact with Perl. But re-writing the API‘s implementation is risky and the company has shied away from that.
Fixing API bugs still require to dive into a Perl system. However, I found it easier turning Python or JS devs into Perl devs than into DB engineers. So, usually, the DB subsystem bears the greater risk and requires more expensive personnel.
autoexec · 5h ago
Perl is still what I reach for when I have a regex heavy task. At my job there's a near 50/50 split between python and perl scripts. I've re-written some of the perl used for general sysadmin tasks in python too, but I haven't seen enough benefit to justify doing more. It works. Plus, in my opinion, perl is more fun to write.
nailer · 5h ago
> Perl is still what I reach for when I have a regex heavy task.
That's the point of PCRE though - you get Perl's excellent regex implementation in more places.
autoexec · 5h ago
It's not usually that there are features I need which python doesn't support, it's just much more cumbersome to use in python compared to perl where it's part of the language and can be used just about anywhere without even adding another import.
macintux · 4h ago
The friction difference between "part of the syntax of the language" and "have to use this library" is enormous.
bornfreddy · 3h ago
Enormous like "import re"? It is still part of core python.
rjh29 · 1h ago
With perl you just run $foo =~ /regex/ anywhere, you can also put that into an if condition or assign the results to a variable, you can use variables like $1 and $2 (the captures) immediately after, as they are global. You can use any choice of delimiter for the regex to improve readability (i.e. you don't have to use quotes, if your regex contains a lot of quotes).
So you can do while ($foo =~ /bar/) or even ($result) = $foo =~ /bar/.
Python has only raw strings and until recently you couldn't even do if ($regex) { ... } you had to assign the match to a variable and check it, causing lots of nested if/then blocks. It's just clunkier.
macintux · 2h ago
Yes.
When writing a Perl script, there's literally zero friction to using regular expressions because they're baked in. I just type what I want to run.
When writing a Python script, I realize I want a regular expression, and I have to stop the code I'm writing, jump to the top of the file, import re, go back to where I was.
Now, maybe I'm writing a quick script and I don't care about tidiness, and I only have to stop what I'm doing, put "import re", and then write the code I want, but still, I'm stopping.
Or I'll wait until I've written the code I want, and go back and put it in. If I remember. If not, I'll find out when I run it that I forgot it.
Or my IDE will show me in red ugly squigglies that I need to right click or hover, and there'll be a recommended solution to import it.
This is all friction that isn't there with Perl.
fragmede · 2h ago
> stop the code I'm writing, jump to the top of the file, import re, go back to where I was.
If you're just shitting out a one off script and that's really a problem for you, you can just "import re" where you are, there's nothing other than convention and scope that forces you to import everything at the top. Given thats also a problem with sys and os, importing all the commonly used libraries and carrying that around as a template (from print import pprint, anyone?) also seems reasonable, if that's really a problem for you.
6031769 · 6h ago
Yes, we mostly use Perl for new software.
If you let your codebase get into an "ancient" state then that's a problem of your own creation rather than that of the language or system in which it is written.
kosolam · 6h ago
I’m very curious to hear your experience building greenfield projects with perl today. And what are the main advantages you feel that you get from it?
6031769 · 5h ago
The experience is all good. The toolchain, the speed of both development and execution, the breadth of CPAN and the famous backwards-compatibility all make for a happy development team.
The advantages are the same as they have been for years: cross-platform compatibility, one system to run all aspects of a large project, the flexibility to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and most maintainable manner.
One caveat: we don't do any MSWin32 development at all. I'm vaguely aware that there are some extra considerations on that O/S but it isn't something which we have to deal with.
kosolam · 4h ago
Sounds good, thanks. I suppose ai models are really good at generating perl?
doublerabbit · 6h ago
For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with lots of miniature sized files from the renderer.
Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong.
If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run.
I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty comprehensive and still holding weight.
As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast optimism in to the future of programming technologies but with perl it has been battle tested and just works.
sundarurfriend · 5h ago
> Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's non-trivial for *nix hosts.
The rest of your comment makes me think the "non-trivial" was a typo and meant to be something else.
_zoltan_ · 5h ago
I'd run from a place that wants to use Perl for new software. Run and never look back.
macintux · 4h ago
Whereas I'd run to such a place. I miss it.
daneel_w · 6h ago
I maintain and develop the back-end of a telecom services provider. It's almost 100% Perl, and once in a blue moon when we add something entirely new we usually stick with Perl.
forgotmypw17 · 6h ago
Yes, it's still well-maintained and highly backwards-compatible, avoiding breaking changes between releases.
walterbell · 6h ago
We need an ROI metric to quantify the backward compatibility and low churn of Perl relative to languages like Python, Ruby, golang.
lordofgibbons · 6h ago
Golang declared a perfect backwards compatibility guarantee way back when version 1 was released. So in this regard, Perl isn't unique.
naikrovek · 6h ago
well, Go has broken that backwards compatibility when it was deemed important enough to break things. So it's not "perfect" and I imagine Perl's isn't either.
drysart · 5h ago
Perl as a language is pretty mature and rarely sees breaking changes (and what breaking changes exist are in corners of the language that are extremely esoteric even for Perl). You can take a Perl script written 25 years ago and it'll still run just fine.
New language features and things that might alter existing behavior are usually locked behind a version declaration opt-in at the top of your script. You need to do something similar to `use v5.39;` to unlock new behaviors from that version of Perl -- which may contain breaking changes but those are also generally backward compatible too.
But that's for the base language and standard library. Individual third-party packages may vary in their backward compatibility.
dcassett · 5h ago
I remember a breaking change that was not esoteric: "keys %hash" started producing a different result each time the script was run. It required replacing the construct with "sort keys %hash" to get reproducible results.
jcynix · 4h ago
I can't remember a time where "keys %hash" returned the keys in a defined order. And I've been using Perl for over 30 years now.
I've just consulted my first issue of "Programming Perl" (printed in 1990l and it says:
keys (assoc ARRAY) this function returns a normal array consisting of all the keys of the named associative array. The keys are returned in an apparently random order, but it is the same order as either the values() or each() function produces (given that the associative array has not been modified)
dcassett · 1h ago
Agreed, but prior to the change the "apparently random" as described in the documentation was similar to using random(fixed_seed), rather than the new behavior of random(system_time), which made the output of the script non-reproducible given the same inputs. The change to Perl's behavior was made for security reasons.
(Edited for clarity)
librasteve · 5h ago
Perhaps, but code that inadvertently depends on the Hash implementation returning keys in a particular order is arguably incorrect.
martinflack · 6h ago
And the last release was three weeks ago! Perl 5.42.0 was released July 3, 2025.
SoftTalker · 6h ago
> avoiding breaking changes
Perl 6?
It was so breaking they don't even call it Perl anymore.
kstrauser · 6h ago
In fairness to Perl, that's a good reason not to consider it a breaking change.
em-bee · 6h ago
perl 6/raku was a redesign. as far as i remember, upgradeability from perl 5 without code changes was never the goal.
aaronbaugher · 6h ago
It's unfortunate that that wasn't clear to people who weren't closely involved with Perl at the time. So many people got the impression that Perl 5 was outdated as soon as 6 was in development, so they thought they had to move on from it. It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.
petdance · 3h ago
> It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.
We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.
Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.
aaronbaugher · 1h ago
Looks like the last time I tried out Perl 6 was almost 10 years ago. Even wrote a few blog posts about it before giving up on it again. Might be time to take another look.
oofbey · 2h ago
Agreed. Probably why they renamed it. I think everybody probably wishes they'd taken a new name from the start.
SoftTalker · 6h ago
Isn't that the definition of a breaking change?
em-bee · 5h ago
yeah, in the same sense that D is a breaking change for C, or wayland for X11. the point is that as far as i know it was never intended that existing perl 5 code would be rewritten. unlike the python 2 to 3 change where the intention was that people would convert using 2to3 and later using compatibility modules that allowed writing code that works with both. python 2 development stopped after 12 years, much later than they expected.
0xbadcafebee · 5h ago
If Ford makes a 4-door passenger car, and then comes out with a 2-door sports car, and keeps producing both cars, that's not a breaking change. It's just a new car.
Perl 5 is still supported, Perl 6 (Raku) continues independently.
SoftTalker · 6h ago
How good are LLMs at writing Perl? I've tried to use Perl a few times, even being pretty conversant with shell scripting, sed, awk, etc. I found Perl to be difficult because it's so full of idioms that you "just have to know" and (to me anyway) TIMDOWTDI actually makes things harder for a new/learning perl developer.
What I want is TITBWTDI (this is the best way to do it).
cestith · 5h ago
Check out Modern Perl. It won’t limit you to one best way for everything. It will give you one best way to do many things, and a smaller set of good ways to do others. https://isbn.nu/9781680500882
Keep in mind though that the current state of Perl includes being in the process of getting a native object model baked into the language core. So that’s still in some flux but it’ll be better than choosing among eight different external object model libraries. It’s also more performant. The docs for that I’m not sure are in a bound paper book anywhere yet, but I’d happily be corrected.
johnisgood · 5h ago
Claude seems to fare well. I have used it for a couple of existing and new projects written entirely in Perl. LOC was below 2k per project.
doublerabbit · 5h ago
Not bad. At my last gig we had a modernization project where we were converting Perl to Python and the company invested in their own self-hosted co-pilot. (Bank)
It would hiccup where it would write the existing perl codebase in to a hallucinated python syntax but this was two years ago.
polytely · 6h ago
I've actually started using raku for hobby projects recently (my day job is C#) and it is actually really fun to write.
0xbadcafebee · 5h ago
Python is only 3 years younger than Perl, should we throw Python away? (actually, I'm on board...)
weare138 · 4h ago
Yes. I do. Just in case anyone doesn't know Perl has been in active development and has been adding new features the entire time. It was never 'dead'. This is Perl's new OO interface that was recently added as a stable feature in 5.40:
Generally only places that have a large amount of existing Perl and Perl developers. It’s a fine language with a strong ecosystem but even most Perl shops have a second backend language these days. I would happily use it again, but the only compelling reason to write new stuff in Perl is if most of your existing stuff is.
oofbey · 2h ago
The TIOBE index says Perl is currently the #11 most popular programming language (up from #30 a year ago). ref: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
Now, I don't actually believe this, because that puts Perl way ahead of Rust (currently at #18). So the big thing I'm taking away from this little research post is that I no longer trust the Tiobe index. Too bad - it felt pretty reliable for a long time.
petdance · 21m ago
I suggest that there are no meaningful conclusions to be gleaned from the TIOBE rankings.
leejo · 2h ago
Which is more believable or surprising:
a) there is probably several orders of magnitude more Perl code running out there in the wild than Rust?
b) the TIOBE index was ever meaningful?
oofbey · 1h ago
I'm sure (a) is true. But TIOBE is supposed to be some balance between "total mass of existing code" and "current interest in new code".
77pt77 · 3h ago
Well, I assume this is for Perl 6 that never really caught on.
ValtteriL · 6h ago
Doing the God's work. Love both.
Bluestein · 6h ago
TIMTOWTDI!
neuroelectron · 3h ago
Perl? Wow. I'm a big fan of perl, but I gotta say I thought it was dead. Despite, the dynamic features of the language, I feel like it's much mote secure and mature than other modern convenience languages like JS/TS and Python. It certainly is much faster in general.
petdance · 20m ago
What does "dead" mean?
kosolam · 6h ago
Way to go. Proxmox is one of the best open source free software out there for small businesses/lab use cases IMHO
tingletech · 2h ago
If you use Fidelity Charitable giving, the perl foundation is listed under "Yet Another Society"
lynx97 · 5h ago
People are going to HATE me for this, but I genuinely think: This feels like beating a dead horse...
I had my Perl phase. I even wrote the first piece of code for my employer in Perl. Well, it was a CGI script, so that was kind of natural back then.
But really, since all the hollow Perl6 stuff I've seen, I've never really read or heard anything about the language in the past, what, 10 to 15 years?
There are tons of languages out there, all with their own merits. But everything beyond Perl5 felt like someone was trying to piggyback on a legacy. If you invent a new language, thats fine, call it foobar and move on. But pretending to be the successor to Perl feels like a marketing stunt by now...
cestith · 5h ago
Perl 5 got a development release within the last week, and the latest production release within the last month or so.
jcynix · 4h ago
No reason to hate you, just because you didn't pay attention ;-)
and you'll learn that there are ongoing events related to Perl and Raku.
librasteve · 4h ago
not sure I hate you :-)
Raku has perl DNA running through it … both languages were authored by Larry Wall and the Raku (perl6 at the time) design process was to take RFAs from the perl community and to weave them together.
I do wonder why you consider Raku to be hollow? Sure it has suffered from a general collapse of the user base and exodus to eg. Python. This has slowed the pace of development, but the language has been in full release since Oct 2015 and continues to have a very skilled core dev team developing and improving.
There are several pretty unique features in Raku - built in Grammars, full on unicode grapheme support (in regexes), lazy evaluation, hyper operators, and so on that work well together.
Maybe unpopular, true. But hollow?
ei8ths · 5h ago
thanks proxmox!
77pt77 · 3h ago
Wow!
Less than a month of compensation at FAANG is newsworhty.
LetMeLogin · 6h ago
While I appreciate the gesture, it seems a bit low based on the fact that they're using it as their "core" technology, every single day.
0cf8612b2e1e · 6h ago
This happens every time. Company does good thing. “But, why didn’t they do 2X good thing?!”
Working for a F500 company, I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use. Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.
petdance · 19m ago
> I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use.
"We've never heard of that happening, so no."
naikrovek · 6h ago
> Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.
this is my experience, too. they'll gladly take, take, take, take, take, and take some more, but when it comes time to give just a little bit, they balk.
npteljes · 5h ago
Same for normal people, for example with any paid internet service. They watch 2 hours of youtube every day, but to pay a pittance for YouTube Premium? Unimaginable, how dare they ask for anything for the service. In every thread where it comes up, people act like it's pulling teeth. And also, microtransactions work because of the same reason. People's relationship with paying for things is complicated.
dewey · 6h ago
Maybe, but it’s also 100% higher than what 99% of companies built on open source software give back.
neuroelectron · 3h ago
I was thinking about matching it since I'm retired and my early and mid career was built on perl but I also feel a bit unqualified as I'm not really a great programmer or really understand deep problems like language design and compilers/interpreters.
applied_heat · 6h ago
Proxmox is based on perl? Can you expand on that? Web front end, vm automation…?
npteljes · 5h ago
Proxmox is written in perl, among other things like HTML and JS, on top of the other free software that they are using like QEMU. They also use Rust at places.
I don't think Proxmox is a huge company making lots of money though either... I've used it for free for years. I imagine most people use it for free. I'm sure there are companies paying for it, but I don't think it's some monster money maker?
gmuslera · 5h ago
I bet that they grew a lot with VMWare/Broadcom changes, even the somewhat paid subscriptions. But they are not yet one of the (commercial/enterprise) big names. I suppose that this donation is part of their "now that I have a positive budget, what I do with it?" plan, and finance growing up both as company/support as in adding features.
SoftTalker · 5h ago
They are based in Austria, my assumption has been that most of their business/enterprise customers are in the EU.
Some companies immediately understand the value of this kind of support. Getting that news out will hopefully allow me to find more orgs who can/will donate in this range.
So, if anyone has any leads, please do contact me: olaf@perlfoundation.org If you take a close look at your stack, you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.
I am really impressed of how Raku developers keep their motivation to work on it
And I am a bit curious to know if Proxmox is interested in Raku at all, or are they only using Perl
...and when looking through the sources, I thought <the proxmox folks> "still use perl?"
I guess proxmox IS 17 years old...
if you're motivated to do OSS work, the best bet is to figure out how to take VC money to do that and don't end up on some blacklist.
How important it is, how much it's used and the money they get.
It's nice when companies contribute fixes and testing up-stream, even when it's not a monetary contribution.
Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based on my experience here: That just shows you how broke EU tech companies are that even 10k is newsworthy for them.
For context, I only worked for average (not big-tech/unicorns) EU/French/Dutch/German tech companies my whole life and I was shocked to see how much more, the average US tech companies spend on frivolities(forget the wages) than the European companies I worked at.
From what I saw, for US tech companies big or small, buying fully decked MacBooks and Herman Miler chairs for their SW devs was the norm, while I only saw the discount bin chairs and base spec HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops wherever I worked here.
Even where I work now, SW engineers get the same crappy HP notebooks that HR uses to read emails, since beancounters love fleets of the same cheap laptops for everyone, so my manager needs to jump through hoops for the beancounters to let him order more powerful notebooks for the SW engineers in his team, cause ya' know, Docker and VMs eat more resources than Outlook and Excel. This is relatively unheard of for US SW engineers where little expense is spared on equipment.
They even reduced costs related to facility management like AC runtime and cleaning services, so trash bins are emptied twice a week instead of daily, leading to some funny office aromas in summer, if you catch my drift. And of course, they blame Putin for this.
I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy.
My explanation is, European companies are just run the same way EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting, so instead of trying to make money by innovating and investing and splurging to get the best of everything, they instead try to increase the profits by cutting all possible costs from purchasing to labors' wages and offshoring, since I assume that's also what's taught in European MBA schools.
If your anti-EU rant is right, open source projects should just naturally come into a whole bunch of donations this size from these rich US companies. Does that happen? Especially once we get past the big 3?
How is it anti-EU? I was explaining what I observed, nothing what I said has to do with the EU political union, but with the way EU companies operate. Criticizing the way European companies choose to do business doesn't make you "anti-EU".
What's with this hyper-partisan George-Bush-style "You're either with us or against us" type of arguments, where you can't criticize something without someone accusing you of being a hater?
Can't we just debate things reasonably and assuming good faith as per HN rules, instead of resorting to attacks and accusations of partisan?
It's actually almost the opposite here in the US. Because labor is expensive, especially engineering labor, it doesn't make sense to scrimp on expenses like computer equipment or office chairs that support that labor, as you want to reduce development costs. If a faster laptop costs $500/unit more but reduces toil/wasted time for a $300k/yr developer of 30 minutes a day, it is easily justified that it's worth the cost since labor cost is so much higher.
For example, note how all the stories about institutional investors buying up housing stock mention BlackRock, even though REITs and private equity firms are doing much, much more of this business.
There are concerns because by default they usually cast votes by board recommendations and since they have such a huge stewardship of the stock market it means others can have more direct influence, but Vanguard itself is otherwise as neutral a stock ownership intermediary as can pretty much exist.
BlackRock != BlackStone, if that’s what you were thinking of.
also proxmox is German.
Austrian, please.
I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552 and clone a full VM with it".
https://github.com/agentify-sh/cursor-proxmox-mcp
And we naturally try to contribute to every project we use however possible, be it in the form of patches, QA, detailed bug reports, ... and especially for QEMU et al. we're pretty content with our impact, at least compared to resources of other companies leveraging it, I think.
If all it'd take is being "just" a simple UI wrapper, it would make lots of things way easier for us :-)
This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't exist as a mature option.
Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
The feature set of Kubernetes and Proxmox VE do not really overlap completely IMO, or would need much more hands-on approach and specialized in-house staff to set up and maintain, why go for that if you can do everything one need with much less headache.
As the former needs much more dedicated management and maintenance resources and is often pulling in more complexity than most need, but there one needs also to differentiate from those developing and releasing their own applications and being fine with what e.g. kubernetes offers, quite possibly even wanting that, compared to those e.g. providing infrastructure for internal use or just favoring more monolithic applications, often boils down to taste and what one is comfortable with. Our enterprise customers are very diverse, from small shops with two or three node clusters to host the office infra to five digit hosts and 6 digits VMs spread out. We even know a few setups using Proxmox VE as basis for their Kubernetes cluster.
Finally, PVE is quite a bit older than Kubernetes, we still exist and see a lot of adoption (already before the Broadcom deal, albeit there was an uptick since then), so even without some technical comparison of features or use cases or the like it seems clear that Kubernetes isn't an alternative for all, just like Proxmox VE certainly isn't one.
> Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
One should not confuse being very popular in the home lab scene due to being very approachable, simple to set up, and most importantly 100% FLOSS, not just open core or the like, with it being the main or target audience, but we're really happy with the synergies it provides.
And actually I'd not frame it as bad thing that Proxmox VE is used that way, we do not want to be a club that is hard to access, neither cost wise nor hindering scaling smaller VM labs to bigger setups, and certainly not from a complexity barrier.
Let's not pretend that Proxmox or any of these are silver bullets that kill the (inherent) complexity demon. Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and standalone QEMU.
> Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
There are widely different level of expertise needed though, and the setups that often are managed by admins with not in-depth expertise in clustering or SDN can still get things done with Proxmox VE, and if they are out of idea we got our enterprise support and naturally also the very active and friendly community forum to help.
> Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and standalone QEMU.
Yeah, I really do not get that point, you basically invalidate 95% of Proxmox VE's feature set because it might not be fully leveraged by a specific user group and because there are some different solutions that also allow one to do similar things. That would also invalidate Kubernetes, it's not completely unpopular in small labs either after all.
To be honest, to me, it feels a bit to me like a justification attempt for the initial post in this chain here that brushed off Proxmox VE as just some small UI/UX wrapper around QEMU/KVM and all the Real Work™ being done by others, possibly because you never actually used it, but I might read it the wrong way, and I'm certainly not offended in any way, just find it a bit odd.
No comments yet
Would have been cool of you to just say "oh neat, I didn't realize that you did all that too".
There could be tons! Or not many. It's completely irrelevant to my comment.
In my little world this largely was true until Broadcom bought VMware and proceeded to blow it up.
I know of a handful of rather “large” (100s of physical servers at least) VMware based products that are as quickly as possible migrating to proxmox.
Given how universal this is for my little slice of IT, I imagine this is quite pervasive for the “mid tier” VMware organization.
The funny thing is with Cursor I can just generate a new capability, like the clone and template actions were created after asking Sonnet 4.
For context, here's that classic thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 :)
I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running at the same time.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts
I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.
I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it.
So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.
I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens.
https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/
I remember at a former company, we had a major migration away from Perl 12 years ago. The Perl code base was considered extremely ancient even back then.
To avoid creating new Perl code from scratch we created a REST API many years ok which new frontends and middlewares use instead of interacting with the core itself. That has been successful to some extent as we can have frontend teams coding in JS/TypeScript without them needing to interact with Perl. But re-writing the API‘s implementation is risky and the company has shied away from that.
Fixing API bugs still require to dive into a Perl system. However, I found it easier turning Python or JS devs into Perl devs than into DB engineers. So, usually, the DB subsystem bears the greater risk and requires more expensive personnel.
That's the point of PCRE though - you get Perl's excellent regex implementation in more places.
So you can do while ($foo =~ /bar/) or even ($result) = $foo =~ /bar/.
Python has only raw strings and until recently you couldn't even do if ($regex) { ... } you had to assign the match to a variable and check it, causing lots of nested if/then blocks. It's just clunkier.
When writing a Perl script, there's literally zero friction to using regular expressions because they're baked in. I just type what I want to run.
When writing a Python script, I realize I want a regular expression, and I have to stop the code I'm writing, jump to the top of the file, import re, go back to where I was.
Now, maybe I'm writing a quick script and I don't care about tidiness, and I only have to stop what I'm doing, put "import re", and then write the code I want, but still, I'm stopping.
Or I'll wait until I've written the code I want, and go back and put it in. If I remember. If not, I'll find out when I run it that I forgot it.
Or my IDE will show me in red ugly squigglies that I need to right click or hover, and there'll be a recommended solution to import it.
This is all friction that isn't there with Perl.
If you're just shitting out a one off script and that's really a problem for you, you can just "import re" where you are, there's nothing other than convention and scope that forces you to import everything at the top. Given thats also a problem with sys and os, importing all the commonly used libraries and carrying that around as a template (from print import pprint, anyone?) also seems reasonable, if that's really a problem for you.
If you let your codebase get into an "ancient" state then that's a problem of your own creation rather than that of the language or system in which it is written.
The advantages are the same as they have been for years: cross-platform compatibility, one system to run all aspects of a large project, the flexibility to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and most maintainable manner.
One caveat: we don't do any MSWin32 development at all. I'm vaguely aware that there are some extra considerations on that O/S but it isn't something which we have to deal with.
Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong.
If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run.
I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty comprehensive and still holding weight.
As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast optimism in to the future of programming technologies but with perl it has been battle tested and just works.
The rest of your comment makes me think the "non-trivial" was a typo and meant to be something else.
New language features and things that might alter existing behavior are usually locked behind a version declaration opt-in at the top of your script. You need to do something similar to `use v5.39;` to unlock new behaviors from that version of Perl -- which may contain breaking changes but those are also generally backward compatible too.
But that's for the base language and standard library. Individual third-party packages may vary in their backward compatibility.
I've just consulted my first issue of "Programming Perl" (printed in 1990l and it says:
keys (assoc ARRAY) this function returns a normal array consisting of all the keys of the named associative array. The keys are returned in an apparently random order, but it is the same order as either the values() or each() function produces (given that the associative array has not been modified)
(Edited for clarity)
Perl 6?
It was so breaking they don't even call it Perl anymore.
We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.
Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.
Perl 5 is still supported, Perl 6 (Raku) continues independently.
What I want is TITBWTDI (this is the best way to do it).
Keep in mind though that the current state of Perl includes being in the process of getting a native object model baked into the language core. So that’s still in some flux but it’ll be better than choosing among eight different external object model libraries. It’s also more performant. The docs for that I’m not sure are in a bound paper book anywhere yet, but I’d happily be corrected.
It would hiccup where it would write the existing perl codebase in to a hallucinated python syntax but this was two years ago.
https://github.com/Perl-Apollo/Corinna
Now, I don't actually believe this, because that puts Perl way ahead of Rust (currently at #18). So the big thing I'm taking away from this little research post is that I no longer trust the Tiobe index. Too bad - it felt pretty reliable for a long time.
a) there is probably several orders of magnitude more Perl code running out there in the wild than Rust?
b) the TIOBE index was ever meaningful?
I had my Perl phase. I even wrote the first piece of code for my employer in Perl. Well, it was a CGI script, so that was kind of natural back then.
But really, since all the hollow Perl6 stuff I've seen, I've never really read or heard anything about the language in the past, what, 10 to 15 years?
There are tons of languages out there, all with their own merits. But everything beyond Perl5 felt like someone was trying to piggyback on a legacy. If you invent a new language, thats fine, call it foobar and move on. But pretending to be the successor to Perl feels like a marketing stunt by now...
Maybe take a look at the search results from
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl%20conference%202025
and you'll learn that there are ongoing events related to Perl and Raku.
Raku has perl DNA running through it … both languages were authored by Larry Wall and the Raku (perl6 at the time) design process was to take RFAs from the perl community and to weave them together.
I do wonder why you consider Raku to be hollow? Sure it has suffered from a general collapse of the user base and exodus to eg. Python. This has slowed the pace of development, but the language has been in full release since Oct 2015 and continues to have a very skilled core dev team developing and improving.
There are several pretty unique features in Raku - built in Grammars, full on unicode grapheme support (in regexes), lazy evaluation, hyper operators, and so on that work well together.
Maybe unpopular, true. But hollow?
Less than a month of compensation at FAANG is newsworhty.
Working for a F500 company, I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use. Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.
"We've never heard of that happening, so no."
this is my experience, too. they'll gladly take, take, take, take, take, and take some more, but when it comes time to give just a little bit, they balk.
This is their repo: https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-manager.git;a=tree