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Free Resources for Windows Perl Development

Posted by kdawson on from the christmas-present dept.

jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. What about ActivePerl? by Loopy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've used ActiveState's ActivePerl on several windows boxes over the years and have had "trouble-free" experiences with it. Granted, some of the more bleeding-edge modules weren't at the latest revs but the mainstream software I used didn't strictly require those either.

    1. Re:What about ActivePerl? by adamkennedy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My issues with ActivePerl have been that it is fundamentally different to all the other Perl platforms (you don't get the full CPAN, just binary packages) and that because one company is the central gatekeeper of all the binary packages, there was never a reasonable way for CPAN authors to debug their modules.

      I for one wrote 150+ modules, of which a grand total of 7 were available on ActivePerl, due to various bugs in the ActivePerl build farm that went unfixed for years.

      To be truly first-class, you should be the same as the other platforms, not similar-but-different.