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

Works okay, some usage problems.

[Raskolnk]

I've used it to build a moderately sized installation application that was distributed to clients to install our huge application. I had mixed results.

Main problem was licensing. Because it was an installation app, the Build/CM team was responsible to maintain it. IIRC, the license was tied to a given username and host. So, developers can't build the installer themselves, the CM team must do it on request, or setup a shared perl2exe user for everyone on a build server somewhere. Developers, if they want to fix it, must go and work on the shared server. Pain in the ass.

The other issue was lack of Perl know-how. When the compiler complained, I'd have ten people at my desk while I tried to explain how to setup @INC corrrectly.

Seems like a _very_ small shop produces it, and is a little kludgey. Overall though, if my team was just me or a few Perl savvy people, I would recommend it.

As an aside, my reasons behind using perl2exe were:

1) perlcc didn't seem to work at all, and I didn't have the time to muck with it. Has anyone gotten this to work for more than just small or test programs?

2) (and most obnoxious, at least with 5.003(?)) Perl is a pain in the ass to deploy. Licensing issues didn't allow us to distribute ActiveState on NT, and Perl really wants to be compiled on the target machine for Solaris. Compiling a distribution on Solaris hard-codes the prefix-dir, so it expects the target machine to have the same dir structure--which is in violation of my requirements. I emailed the mailing list and got a reply from non other than Randall Schwarz, who basically said (heavily paraphrased), "Yeah, that sucks. Someone's going to fix it eventually." The only solution I could come up with in a short amount of time was to write a wrapper script that mucked with @INC and included paths from the environment before execing anything else.

I love the language, but this is why I don't use it. You can't depend on everyone having installed Perl + all your needed PMs themselves, and its not worth trying to automate it for them. IMHO, its the downfall of the language.

We wanted to have Perl installed with our large Java system to help in performing scripting type tasks, but it was way too big of a pain. Oh well...