a JS script won't run on Linux!

The hell you say. Javascript runs everywhere.

Pretty much everything here is outdated. JavaScript has no issue on a Linux system, I dare say Node.js runs on more Linux systems than anything else. You insist on running a dead distro of Perl (TinyPerl) on a dead OS (Windows XP). You're missing out on what modern perl and modern frameworks can offer.

And also (apparently) modern operating systems.

When working with binary files, Perl can easily read just the first 512 bytes of a 5gb iso file. JavaScript cannot do that. It would try to read the entire file first, and there's nothing you can do to go around that. lol

#!/usr/bin/node
"use strict";
/* perl -wMstrict -le 'open my $fh, "<:raw", "5gig.iso" or die $!;
        seek($fh,0x8000,0) or die $!; read($fh,my $buf,512)==512
        or die; print unpack("H*",$buf)' */
// https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v12.x/api/fs.html
const fs = require('fs');
fs.open( '5gig.iso', 'r', function (err, fd) {
        if (err) throw err;
        var buf = Buffer.alloc(512);
        fs.read(fd, buf, 0, buf.length, 0x8000,
            function (err, bytesRead, buffer) {
                if (err) throw err;
                if (bytesRead!=buf.length)
                    throw "not enough bytes read!";
                console.log(buffer.toString('hex'));
            });
    } );
[download]

I think that Python is much more comparable to Perl than JS is.

I think you are referring to JScript, MS's own dialect from 20 years ago.

That's no good comparison to modern JS.