[lamby]

One of the authors of strip nondeterminism is here. The primary reason it's written in Perl is that given that strip-nondeterminism is used when building 99.9% of all Debian packages, using any other language would have essentially made that language's runtime a dependency for all building Debian packages. (Perl is already required by the build process, whilst Python is not.)

[flkenosad]

Question: is Perl the only runtime the Debian build process relies on?

[yrro]

Any packages with "Essential: yes" (run 'apt list ~E' to see them) are required on any Debian system. Additionally, the 'build-essential' pulls in other packages that must be present to build Debian packages via its dependencies: https://packages.debian.org/sid/build-essential