in reply to Creating Graphical Applications

if "graphical" means you want to draw to the screen directly, there is the SDL-Library.

SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer.graphics-library.

taken from http://www.libsdl.org
There is a perl-interface available (SDL_perl)  here (win32-build) or here, documentation can be found here.