Perl’s actually a surprisingly cool language — CPAN makes it astonishingly easy to not only acquire near-arbitrary functionality but, through more documentation than exists anywhere else in the Open Source community, actually *gasp* understand what you’re doing. Fun.

That being said, I’ll always be a C hacker…and thanks to my good friend and former build engineer, Jason Spence, I’ll have some new toys to play with once I return to the blissful land of raw packetdom (which are so much faster than even generic UDP sockets it’s not even funny). Check it out:

• Next Generation Debug: Include this preprocessor include in your C code and get error messages that reference the file and codeline that spawned the error. It does depend on actually having non-brain-dead error handling, though.
• Stack-Aware Memcpy: Use this version of memcpy and get array bounds checking (or at least, an inability for many buffer overflows to succeed). Vaguely reminiscent of Libsafe.

Cool stuff!