There is existing mobile device which has perl: OpenMoko. perl was one of reasons why I bought one.

root@fic-gta01:~$ uname -a
Linux fic-gta01 2.6.24 #1 PREEMPT Thu Feb 14 11:13:21 UTC 2008 armv4tl unknown
root@fic-gta01:~$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for arm-linux-gnueabi

-V flag doesn't work (missing Config.pm), but mobile devices are different beasts than other platforms because they are quite space limited:

root@fic-gta01:~$ df /
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock4           62576     51872     10704  83% /

This is after clean re-install of rootfs and installation of perl from package using ipkg install perl

To be honest, other than script to change LCD backlight level (just for fun, no practical value) I didn't do much development for on this GTA01 (developers release) device.

I had plan to write xs bindings for OpenMoko UI libraries, but I got distracted by other things, and all-in-all this unit is really development device with various quirks which prevents you to do development on it and use it at same time, so it was neglected for quite some time.

However, my biggest gripe is battery life, and since this required fixes in hardware there is no hope for my unit. However, mass-produced GTA02 unit would be much better match for serious development if for nothing else because it has graphic accelerator which this one lacks (which makes whole GUI somewhat sluggish compared to several years old cell phone).

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