On my system perl is slightly bigger than miniperl:

$ ls -la miniperl perl
-rwxr-xr-x    1 joost    joost     1096819 Jul 21 13:39 miniperl
-rwxr-xr-x    1 joost    joost     1187556 Jul 21 13:40 perl
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The only difference between miniperl and perl is that miniperl cannot load XS-based perl modules as shared objects (that is, it doesn't support DynaLoader).

Miniperl was never intended to be smaller than perl, it's just perl without Dynaloader, so that it can be put in charge of translating and compiling the Dynaloader XS code.

The same is true for microperl, too, only microperl is supposed to one day replace the shell scripting in Configure.

Also, dependencies on XS based shared libraries will not show up using ldd because those libraries are loaded dynamically when needed, so the difference might come from there. update: This can't explain the difference: miniperl can't be linked with XS code, because there is no program to translate XS code at the time miniperl is built.