Win7 - multiple Perl distributions?

woland99 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is it possible to have multiple Perl distributions on Win7 machine?

I need Active State x86 Perl for backward compatibility with some XP programs but I would like to check x64 distribution for performance.

Also - can I run Active State and Strawberry Perl side by side?

Comment on Win7 - multiple Perl distributions?

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Re: Win7 - multiple Perl distributions? by Anonymous Monk on Aug 06, 2013 at 00:08 UTC
yes, provided you don't let any of the respective installers DIDDLE the registry on your behalf, and you install into different base directories, and use activestate zip installer, and portable versions of others (strawberryportable is more portable than plain strawberry, but they're both pretty portable) Re: tool for managing perl in win32 (PATH/PERLLIB/INSTALL_BASE), Re: install activestate 5.10 over 5.8.9 (no, zip),	[reply]
Re: Win7 - multiple Perl distributions? by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Aug 06, 2013 at 02:23 UTC
Also, watch for library version conflicts: many Perl modules rely very heavily upon system or application libraries to work their magic, and you need to be extremely careful, not only that they properly identify and recognize the libraries upon which they depend, but that installations and re-installations performed in one Perl-version context do not de-stabilize another. Windows is very dependent upon its global Registry. One pragmatic suggestion I'd make is that you should set up an entirely-different, non-Administrator, user account under which to perform, say, your Strawberry testing. Make sure that the installers do not request, and do not receive, Administrator-level access. If this is the case, then any registry keys should be under `HKEY_LOCAL_USER`; hence, better-isolated.