The "interepreter" is not necessarily at fault. Many Perl modules use dynamically loaded components that are written in C. These can segfault. On the positive side, most of the ones you get from CPAN have undergone substantial testing.

There is no way to leak memory in a perl environment right?

You can leak memory if you make self-referential data structures. Perl uses a "reference counting" scheme, and only frees objects when their reference count goes to zero. If you make $x a reference to $y, and $y a reference to $x, you have a (small) self-referential data structure that won't be freed unless you first break a reference.