That's because a compiled run-time will have to carry most if not all of Perl.exe with it.

> which I don't dare to imagine what executable size will yield and when.

I think there is an upper limit/plateau once all features are bundled.

Now ... lets suppose a use case where we needed to restart hundreds of Perl scripts as fast as possible:

A "master-demon" holding the sources, compiling,forking and killing other demons is most probably more efficient.

For instance:

A webserver in combination with FCGI can be seen as such a "master-demon".

And mod-perl is the variant where different scripts are sharing the same run-time (with the complication to avoid conflicts to minimize the footprint)