Note: Technically, this post qualifies as paid promotion, because I work for ActiveState. But I volunteered to write about our new Platform and promote it because I think what we're doing is really cool and might be of interest to the Perl community at large.

This is a short excerpt of a longer post that you can read in full on my blog.

TLDR

• We have an entirely new system that supports Windows and Linux (macOS coming soon), providing you binary builds of the Perl core, Perl distros, and supporting C/C++ libraries.
• When you use our State Tool, you can create any number of entirely self-contained virtual environments, one per project. This makes switching between projects trivial and these virtual environments are easily shared across a team or organization.
• No more ActiveState Community License! The only licenses that apply are the original licenses for each open source package we build for you.
• You don't need a Platform account to try this out. But you can play with our system and sign up at any time and keep all the work you've done so far.
• It's usually quite fast. If we've already built a particular distro/language core for the given platform, we use a cached version, so many builds take a few seconds. Entirely new builds are slower, but still faster than doing it by hand locally in many cases, because we distribute work throughout a build farm.
• The core features are all free. Most features are free for public projects. We also have paid features including private projects, build engineering support, support for older platforms, indemnification, and more.
• The Platform has lots of other cool features like revisioned projects, advanced dependency resolution, and more.

Read the rest of the post.