I've pretty much settled on Zig at this point, if only for how dead-simple it is to cross-compile for other hardware platforms. The process of compiling working code for oddball platforms (in my case the Nintendo 64) was way easier than I expected it to be.
The only downside is the stdlib being as fast-moving of a target as it is. Right now I've had to put a pin on getting panic stack traces to work on my N64 code because apparently the upcoming release changes a bunch of stuff around panic/stacktrace handling (and it's already changed quite a bit over the years even before these new changes).
> how dead-simple it is to cross-compile for other hardware platforms
The fact that zig can compile C code makes it useful for other languages too.
I recently started using `zig cc` to cross-compile Nim for lots of different platforms within the same environment.
It takes no time to setup and, honestly, works like magic.
> The fact that zig can compile C code makes it useful for other languages too
Agree, C interop is IMHO the big feature of Zig. There are plenty of systems programming languages in 2025, but where Zig shines is its pragmatism: a single standalone binary containing compiler, libc, build system, code formatter and test runner for C and Zig.
As of late though, I've been concerned with some "holy wars"/"ideological postures" that the dev team started which IMHO departs from the original "let's be pragmatic" mantra.
- There's a bunch of places where the stdlib just crashes on unreachable assertions, and that won't be fixed "because the kernel should have better error reporting".
- There are a bunch of kernel syscalls which are just not possible to call "because C enums should not allow aliases"
- etc
I hope this trend fades away and it gets back on a more pragmatic stance on these issues, nobody wants a systems programming language that plays the programming police.
Otherwise, C3 looks promising as well (though not as nice than Zig IMHO), but currently it's a bit too barebone to my taste. There no stable LSP, no nvim plug-in, etc.
I like Perl mostly because it's poetic (the code is super nice to read, with variable types standing out thanks to sigils), but another core strength is how very fast and light it is.
Instead of "cross-compiling" or just running a native perl interpreter (there's one for about every platform!), I prefer how Actually Portable Executables make Perl multiplatform with just 1 binary asset running everywhere!
I wanted to write a webserver processing CGI to learn more about the "old school web", so I wrote https://github.com/csdvrx/PerlPleBean and the simplicity of just downloading and running the .com on anything is very nice
I'm now trying to do the same in Python3, but it's not as fun - and I'm not yet to the part where I will try to safely run python code within the python webserver, either through restrictedpython or ast.parse(), ast.walk(), eval(compile()) ...
They call it like that, but it depends on the programmer as always. The problem is, that it is really flexible, more so than python or javascript, so it gives you all the tools to shoot yourself in the foot and take away the leg with it.
While cool for jokes or serious DSL's, it may lead to difficult to understand code. (Nothing wrong with Damian Conway btw, I just remembered he used source filters in interesting ways).
> They call it like that, but it depends on the programmer as always.
There are different styles, but in general they are concise, and I like them.
perl use various sigils to remain concise, while other languages take a lot of room on the screen: too many letters in the usual function names, not enough sigils within the language.
It's like if everything was in binary or hex, instead of using the full range of ASCII: while technically possible, it may be harder to fit into your head
Python has one sub-style I dislike the most: using tabs for indentation, because how much EXTRA room they use on the screen.
It must not just be me, as there are solutions for coloring the spaces (I forked https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow to focus on black-and-white and using spaces instead of tabs)
I use space to limit the issue, but I can't make python less verbose.
> it gives you all the tools to shoot yourself in the foot and take away the leg with it.
python isn't innocent either: I recently traced a issue where exit(0) wasn't working to a threading problem, making a bad use of atexit.
I can, in vim it's simple. It just bothers me that it is the default and I have to take care of tabs with the rainbow, or a toggle shortcut like:
function TabCollapse_Toggle() abort
if &tabstop ==1
set tabstop=8
else
set tabstop=1
endif
endfunction
BTW if you hate tabs looking like other characters and other invisible characters (like spaces at the end of line, non breaking spaces...), I have a solution in CuteVim (https://github.com/csdvrx/CuteVim : just run the portable executable) where I mapped it by default to a Fxx key
If you already use vim, here's the relevant part: assuming your Shift-F11 is free, add to your vimrc:
" Default is off, `se list` to turn on and `se nolist` to turn off
" Traditional with ISO-8859-1:
"set listchars=tab:»·space:_,trail:·,eol:¶
" Or cuter with unicodes:
set listchars=tab:↹⇥,space:_,nbsp:␣,trail:•,extends:⟩,precedes:⟨,eol:↲
set showbreak=↪
inoremap <silent> <S-F11> <Esc>:set list!<CR>
noremap <silent> <S-F11> :set list!<CR>
Shift-F11 will then become a toggle, to show you tabs: you will see ↹ where the tab starts, and ⇥ for how long it is
Sure it will work. Even before I discovered this method (which is simple), I was using four spaces typed manually, for indentation in Python, for years.
Maybe it is you who "will not work".
Did you try it before commenting? I already said it works fine.
100% depends on how it’s written. It gives a ton of flexibility regarding incorporating “magic variables” which can lead to incredibly abstruse code. The language motto is “there’s more than one way to do it”, and that’s implemented to a fault.
Paraphrased quote from one of my professors years ago:
Writing readable perl is easy, just code it like it's LISP.
Granted, he was working with it in AI/bioinformatics.
One of my classmates who moved into the IT/management side of things historically got much quicker responses from the dev team whenever he volunteered to code something, as he was always going to do it in perl.
Same with C or C++. Only recently there came up some examples of well-written
C++ code. But most of old cooperate, Microsoft or Stroustrup code is just horrible, worse than hard-core perl nonsense.
Real Programmers can write FORTRAN in any language.
Making a large code base easy to read is very hard. People often work on tiny code bases and talk about how easy it is to read, not understanding that they are comparing something with a couple thousand lines of code to something with tens of millions.
> Only recently there came up some examples of well-written C++ code.
I'm not sure what you're referring to (link?) but note that whether C++ code is good or bad can depend strongly on the tooling. Certain coding patterns can be fantastic when your tooling can adequately detect their misuse, and awful when it doesn't. Which means sometimes you can't tell just look at code and tell whether it is good or bad.
> But most of old cooperate, Microsoft or Stroustrup code is just horrible, worse than hard-core perl nonsense.
I got the impression Microsoft's C code was always pretty good, their C++ not so much a decade ago - not sure how their C++ is now.
Depends on who wrote it. My own Perl code, and plenty I've seen, is extremely clean and readable; sadly, a lot isn't. I'm sure clean and readable C++ exists, but the stuff I have to work with - big codebases with tons of history - is not. "Terrifying" would be more apt in most cases.
The Perl code I write today is much cleaner and easier to follow than what I wrote 30 years ago. I hope that's true of my programs in other languages too.
A frequent opinion. Easy way to fit in for people who never bothered to learn the language. Which is all the more sad that Perl is super easy to learn (one layer at a time).
Perl was my first "real" language, i.e. the first one that actually "clicked" for me. Still holds a soft spot in my heart, even though I don't use it much these days. It's one of the few languages (along with Ruby, Erlang, and Zig) that I feel have made me a better programmer by learning them.
Just wanted to say that I really dig your enthusiasm! I read most of PerlPleBean’s README and was smiling the whole time - APE was so exciting to read about when it came out, and your project may just inspire me to look more into what it can do!
> The only downside is the stdlib being as fast-moving of a target as it is.
Ah that's an interesting take, my opinion is that the stdlib doesn't move fast enough.
In its current state it's pretty broken, most of the "process", "os" and "posix" modules are either straight up raising unreachable in normal scenarios, or simply badly designed. I would like the stdlib to be much more fast moving and fix all these issues, but I had the impression most work on it is frozen until 0.15 or 0.16, after incremental compilation is done.
You are right, the stdlib is not the highest priority right now. There are major improvements coming in 0.14 though. The new default allocator for example. I think the problem you describe can be solved by having more contributors focussing on the standard library. With the compiler, there are bottlenecks which make onboarding new people hard. This is a smaller problem in stdlib.
> I think the problem you describe can be solved by having more contributors focussing on the standard library.
I don't think so, my impression is that stdlib improvements are volontarily frozen for now, not because of a lack of contributors but because of a lack of clear plan as to what the stdlib should look like. There are a number of issues and PR of people willing to contribute to stdlib that are stalled.
That's not to say that's its bad per se, "we don't have a plan for now and don't want people to commit time for an unclear target" is a perfectly OK answer.
The only downside is the stdlib being as fast-moving of a target as it is. Right now I've had to put a pin on getting panic stack traces to work on my N64 code because apparently the upcoming release changes a bunch of stuff around panic/stacktrace handling (and it's already changed quite a bit over the years even before these new changes).