Re: Re: Perl executables on a machine w/out Perl installed

That's not a compiler, except in the sense of "compile" meaning "to bring together". It's merely an installer-maker.

It does nothing to speed up the run time. It can certainly be fooled about which of your library versions need to be included. It duplicately installs modules. The source code is trivially contained within the exe file, for anyone to pluck out. And the interpreter is useless except for that program, and cannot be reused for other Perl programs.

Much better to tell people to spend two minutes installing Perl from activestate, the three PPM commands they'll need, and then they have not only your program up and running, but have an entire environment to use others as well.

perl2exe is a scam. Please stop promoting it.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Comment on Re: Re: Perl executables on a machine w/out Perl installed

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Re: Re: Re: Perl executables on a machine w/out Perl installed by jepri (Parson) on Jun 05, 2001 at 07:17 UTC
merlyn, it does have one use. It makes programs easy to install. VB kicks Perl in this regard. Yesterday we walked into a clients office and installed a VB front end to a database on his machine. It was so easy - CDROM in drive, double click on icon, click go. After a couple of tries, even the client could get it right. Now we can just send him the updates, and he can install them himself. He can even install the program on other machines. I'm really beginning to envy windows programmers for that little trick. No screwing around downloading this, running that, resolving this error - it's just "disc in drive, double click". Perl could really benefit from something like that. Then we (the whole community) could distribute our programs as exe files that just get up and do their stuff without forcing the users to spend time and mental effort figuring out how to install it. Something like that is valuable in an enterprise environment. I know all your other comments are correct, but something like Perl2exe helps when dealing with people who have to pause to wipe the drool off the mousepad. ____________________ Jeremy I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.	[reply]
(tye)Re: Perl executables on a machine w/out Perl installed by tye (Sage) on Jun 05, 2001 at 08:48 UTC
It takes 10 minute's work to make a CD that installs Perl and your script with one mouse click. Do that rather than use perl2exe. (I'd start with IndigoPerl from http://www.indigostar.com as that install is trivial to script.) - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]