minimal perl distro

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

Hi ! I need a "minimal" RunTime Perl distribution to be installed on workstations running Windows (XP or higher).

By minimal, I mean that, for the lowest possible disk-cost, I get all basic language features for executing scripts:

no module, no pragma, (no "use ...), no debugging facility, no doc, no binary except "perl" : just "runtime".

Of course, I'll add supplementary pragmas and modules over this basis for scripts to be able to work ;-)!

Do you know whether any project exists like that?

If here is not the proper place to ask this question, where ?

Thanks to all in advance.

Comment on minimal perl distro

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Re: minimal perl distro by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 28, 2010 at 07:55 UTC
I think that PAR::Packer can build such a minimal distribution for you, at least when you build an `.exe` file and then unpack its contents using any Zip utility. As an alternative, I would look at the `miniperl.exe` executable that gets built when you compile Perl. If you use `miniperl.exe`, you will be unable to dynamically load any modules that need a DLL or any C extension, so that might not be ideal.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: minimal perl distro by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 28, 2010 at 08:03 UTC
If you don't need the abilty to use XS modules, you can take the `miniperl` exectuable that's created during the perl build process. You could also look at the Debian perl packages for prior art, which separate the basic perl executable from most core modules, and from the documentation. Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: minimal perl distro by JavaFan (Canon) on Jul 28, 2010 at 09:29 UTC
It's several years ago, but I remember Alan Burlison working on a similar project. His goal was to get a minimal perl to be used on a Solaris QuickStart, shooting such a minimal perl early in the net-boot process to the net-booting machine, so that perl would be available later on the boot process. Of course, a full perl would be installed later in the boot process. And I think he actually ripped out unneeded functionality from perl itself, just to get the size down. You may want to browse the p5p archives.	[reply]
Re: minimal perl distro by davies (Prior) on Jul 28, 2010 at 10:41 UTC
In the msys distribution of git, there is a version of Perl 5.8.8. This comes with a library of modules (total under 10Mb). If you are prepared to put the work in (and know Perl better than I do), I would expect that you could strip this down to something much smaller. I have no idea how this compares to any other distributions that have been suggested. Regards, John Davies	[reply]
Re^2: minimal perl distro by Anonymous Monk on Jul 28, 2010 at 10:53 UTC
LibZip - Create very low weight self executables. (This is the generator of TinyPerl).	[reply]


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