Cannot one write tests in Python? Python seems much nicer to use language. Sadly, I found no library that would allow to create an instance of verilog model from Python and control it (cocotb doesn't allow this).
I verified verilog using the Vera language back in the day. The largest test benches would take 5s to compile to interpreted bytecode. Verification engineers rarely change the design, so keeping that part compiled is great for productivity. It’s really too bad that monolithic compilation is so dang slow.