Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
17 comments
·September 18, 2025Aldipower
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
Username checks out : )
Asmod4n
They had some very recent UI overhauls, it looks more friendly now.
noja
UK link: https://skinflint.co.uk
misja111
Why is this news? Because it's so little? 10K will pay a developer for 2 months maybe ..
colesantiago
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.
mrweasel
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.
tosh
did not know (or forgot) that they were using Perl
Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.
amiga386
See also the little-known website Booking.com
wtcactus
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
"Geizhals Preisvergleich began in July of 1997 as a hobby project—and yes, “Geizhals” literally translates to “skinflint” in English"
yup
tdhz77
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.
Aldipower
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!?
null
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