How Well Does Perl2exe Work for Large Applications?

bobm writes "One of the issues with not using the 'standard' MS tools (VC, VB, etc) is that you face the possiblity of having to load a lot of DLL's to support an application. I'm in this boat with a Perl app I would like to migrate to a couple of Windows 2000 servers. It's a simple app that runs well on our Unix boxes and if it wasn't for the overhead of having to install perl and all of the required modules, it would be a no brainer. However I just stumbled upon Perl2Exe at Indigostar. A small app worked great and I'm wondering if anyone else has used it and how large of an app have they released? Any other pointers and info on pertinent issues would be helpful too."

Comments

My advice: don't

[scrytch]

perl2exe basically statically links your perl app with the perl executable. While this might produce a fairly portable solution, consider the consequence of what will happen when you need to make a change, especially if it's a localized one (e.g. "this dev machine needs the data from a different file"). You are now distributing an opaque chunk of data that you cannot work with. You are losing one of the primary advantages of using a "prototyping" language in the first place. Consider simply distributing perl with the application. It's not like it's terribly complex, it's just an installer exe you double-click, take the defaults, and reboot (or convince it to accept the changes to your PATH in some more convoluted way).

Of course if you're simply trying to distribute a closed-source perl app, more power to you, just be aware that it's not really all that hard to get source code back from the perl executable.