Free Resources for Windows Perl Development

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."

Comments

Re:win32 a first-class citizen?

[timmarhy]

i hate the break it to you but win32 still dominates the landscape, the cpu being 64bit is irrelevant. sounds like you've been duped by the marketing.

Linky

[cleatsupkeep]

Maybe this link will be a little more useful: http://strawberryperl.com/

What about ActivePerl?

[Loopy]

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.

Re:What about ActivePerl?

[adamkennedy]

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.

Re:What about ActivePerl?

[chromatic]

ActivePerl has like a brazillion modules available for it.

Not really. ActiveState made bizarre PPM binary compatibility decisions, which meant that their version of Scalar::Util didn't include the XS components. As the 5.8.x series continued, more and more modules relied on that XS component, which meant that increasing amounts of the CPAN weren't available as PPMs. I don't know the exact figures, but it wouldn't surprise me if one-third to one-half of the CPAN were unavailable from AS's repositories.

(Did you know Alias is one of the CPAN administrators?)

Re:More like lack of interest.

[adamkennedy]

The problem with CPAN Testers is that while it can tell you IF your module is broken, it doesn't give you any way to actually get onto Windows to debug the problem. All you can does is guess the fix and upload a new release, and hope for the best.

CPAN Testers is the canary in the coal mine, which is handy, but doesn't actually help clear out the poison.

Re:Every major version of Windows?

[adamkennedy]

If you'd Read My Fucking Article you'd see that the current set is the MINIMUM initial launch set.

The plan once we are running is to start adding more variations as needed. I'd certainly like to have a 2000 instance.

As for the Windows 95 family, as I understand it support was dropped from the current Perl core for anything older than 2000.