> But everyone just started writing everything in JS, and the ecosystem ended up as a mish-mash of native/non-native.

Because the native written stuff breaks all the darn time and it creates cross-plat nightmares.

My stress levels are inversely proportional to how many native packages I have to try to get building within a project, be that project in Python, Java, or JS.

JS+Node runs on everything. Prepackaged C++ libraries always seem to be missing at least one target platform that I need!

The CPAN 'Alien' infrastructure is great for this, you have pseudo-modules that you can depend on that use vendor packages if available and build the damn thing for you if not.

It's considered ... rude ... in most cases to write a module that needs to build against a native library without also having an Alien dist to handle making sure said library is there by the time it's trying to build against it.

Opinions on perl as a *language* ... vary, let us say ... but I wish people who didn't like writing perl would at least look at how our infrastructure works and steal more of the good parts to make dealing with their preferred language less painful.

Seamless native builds are quite doable, but the tooling needs to be very deliberately designed around that. For a good example of how far this can be taken, consider https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...