It is part of the plans for Perl6/Parrot. The parrot byte code should be compact enough to be able to be loaded faster than the original program.

That is not the case in Perl5, where the byte code is just a serialization of the internal syntax tree and is tightly integgrated (in obscure ways) with the compiler. AFAICR is has been discussed several times and been given up as nearly impossible. Grahams Barr's attempts at a perl compiler has given us the B:: namespace, that contains many useful modules, but no compiler that speeds up loading.

You do have to load the entire perl compiler to be able to interpret eg evals, requires and uses, so the loadtime will be high whatever you do.

In reply to Re: Precompiled perl... by htoug
in thread Precompiled perl... by Eyck

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