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: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?)