What would you think of commercial based products using such a system? I know it makes for huge binaries, but such is life with compiled with run time libraries.
[indigostar.com...]
It basically works like any compiler (P code generator) by including all of Perl's run times within a single exe. For those that worked with the 8-bit micros like Apple2's or Commdores that came with embedded Basic languages, this is all deja vu. The PerlToExe system is the same system used by those Basic P-Code Compilers.
It run's Perl, Perl runs and compiles your code. Then PerlToExe stops before script execution begins and bundles all that up into a single executable. A 50k script may end up as a 1.1meg exe because of all that embedded Perl binary code. It's basically a memory snapshot at the right moment.
The benefit is somewhat code protection and you get a distributable program where the target machine does not have to have Perl to run your program.
However, as you work up in script size, the executables don't expand much more than the size of the script - sometimes even smaller. A 500k script may only build a 1.8meg executable. The bigger the script, the more bang-for-buck.
It's a pretty robust program in that it works with just about any combination of Perl code you can throw at it. There are some caveats, but I don't see anything that you can't work around with ease.
The unregistered version (freely avaiable) will produce exe's that run on the source machine only. So you can give it a run for yourself. I've compiled up 30-40 exe's and I'm fairly impressed with it.
The interesting thing about this latest version to me, is that it works with WinTK. That gives you a quality GUI display from Perl. The newest version of TK for Perl/Win is excellent.
There is also a version of Perl2Exe for Linux.
[dmoz.org...]
[lns.cornell.edu...]
