What version and platform are you using perl with? There were several perl2c and perl2exe projects floating around the net for awhile.

I believe perl used to have a command line switch that would dump the compiled perl byte code which could then be run. I never used it, so I'm not sure if it works, I just remember reading it somewhere...

Ah yes, here it is in the perlrun page:
-u causes Perl to dump core after compiling your script. You can then in theory take this core dump and turn it into an executable file by using the undump program (not supplied). This speeds startup at the expense of some disk space (which you can minimize by stripping the executable). (Still, a ``hello world'' executable comes out to about 200K on my machine.) If you want to execute a portion of your script before dumping, use the dump() operator instead. Note: availability of undump is platform specific and may not be available for a specific port of Perl. It has been superseded by the new perl-to-C compiler, which is more portable, even though it's still only considered beta.

This was from a 5.005 install, HTH