You may consider "miniperl" being mini from different point of view: it has minimal features but not quality of compiled C code.

Namely, it does not have -DMULTIPLICITY, it could have no PerlIO (dont know how it is in 5.8.x but 5.6.x certainly had no PerlIO inside miniperl)

As a side note, in MSWin32 it appears that perl.exe is really small: 41k and perl58.dll is 798k, yet miniperl.exe is about 700k

Courage, the Cowardly Dog