I haven't played with it recently, but I'd expect perlcc to be less likely to work under perl-5.8.0 than under 5.6.1. The problem is that it requires a lot of effort to keep it working correctly as the internals of perl evolve, and very few people seem to have the necessary combination of time, interest and an understanding of the code.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that none of the internals hackers perceive perlcc as doing anything remotely useful: perhaps when someone works out how to achieve something a bit closer to what we feel in our hearts it ought to be doing (translating perl functions to C functions, and loop counters to C ints, for example) that might give them the impetus to put in the necessary effort.

More likely, though, any such effort would be better invested in the Parrot project, and making sure that we can do a good job of compiling perl5 to work efficiently in that environment.

My apologies if this comes as unwelcome news.

Compiling your scripts won't make them more secure to someone determined enough. Read Compiling Perl? and Protecting Perl Code.

To make them more secure, just set the right permissions on your files.

The idea behind perlcc is not to secure your code. In fact securing web applications has much more to do with securing the server they are running on rather than trying to somehow make the code un-readable.

The idea behind perlcc (as i see it) is to make stand-alone applications for people who don't have and don't want to install a full-blown copy of Perl. That said I wish that perlcc was up to par to actually do that. Especially for distributing binarys to people on windows platforms who aren't going to know how to install Perl + needed modules + programs. For that there is PerlApp and Perl2Exe but both are commercial programs and for poor individuals like me are rather expensive :)