Cygwin vs ActiveState

jcoxen has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there any significant advantage, one way or the other, to using CygWin Perl vs ActiveState Perl on Windows boxen?

I've been tasked with developing a project that will run as a periodic cron job from a UNIX server but will also need to be kicked off manually from any of several Windows XP workstations. The code isn't going to be anything particularly difficult. Net::Telnet and Config::Tiny are about as non-vanilla as this is going to get although the Windows version will probably eventually have a Tcl/Tk front-end.

My problem is that I've never done any Perl work on a Microsoft platform and I don't know which Perl to use. I've done searches here on PM but the comparisons I've found between CygWin and ActiveState are all 2-3 years old. I was hoping for some opinions that were a little more current.

Jack

Comment on Cygwin vs ActiveState

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Re: Cygwin vs ActiveState by jdtoronto (Prior) on Jun 29, 2005 at 16:41 UTC
jcoxen I have tried both - because I have Cygwin installed on my machine for development using GCC for a totally different processor. Using Cygwin I had one or two niggling issues that I just couldn't seem to solve. They were not serious and to be honest I cannot recall exactly what they were. I haven't tried Cygwin for about 12 months. ActiveState, on the other hand, has been in daily use here for some years now. It has not always been trouble free, but the more recent releases have generally been very good. The issues have not been with Perl itself, but more to do with ActiveState's module support. Some Tk modules just never seem to make it into their radar view, other pretty basic modules seem likewise to get under the radar out there in BC as well. We use AS for Windows-GUI development - all using Tk generally targetted at WIndows 2000/XP. We also use Perl for Web Applications using CGI::Application mainly. We tend to develop and test initially on XP with AS then move things to a RH7.3/Apache/mod_perl environment here for pre-production testing. Does that help? jdtoronto	[reply]
Re: Cygwin vs ActiveState by jdhedden (Deacon) on Jun 29, 2005 at 16:41 UTC
Having originated from a UNIX environment, I have now been using Perl under Cygwin for quite awhile. It does everything I need it to do on a PC with all the utility of UNIX. Cygwin currently provides Perl v5.8.6. After installing it, you can access CPAN as usual to download the modules you need. For moving a UNIX-developed application to Windows, it is definitely the fastest way to go, and it should enable you to maintain a single code base for both platforms. Remember: There's always one more bug.	[reply]
Re: Cygwin vs ActiveState by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 29, 2005 at 19:51 UTC
Cgywin Upsides: You get a proper fork, alarm works, signals behave mostly as under unix. Downside: It was much slower (circa. 5.6.1) You don't get (and often cannot build) all the nice native platform stuff that comes with AS. Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal? "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Cygwin vs ActiveState by CountZero (Bishop) on Jun 29, 2005 at 20:07 UTC
I have been using AS Perl for about three years now in a business environment, mainly for Apache/mod_perl dynamic website scripting, but also for scripts to parse insurance statistics in different file-formats into a format for loading in our database. I use Komodo as editor and it ties in nicely with AS Perl. PPM is a great utility to get compiled modules without compiling them yourself and althouhg not all of the CPAN modules are available, many are and the most important missing modules are compiled by third parties (such as PodMaster) and made available on their PPM-sites. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]