ActivePerl is a version of Perl for Windows, ported by
ActiveState. It's worth knowing that 'Perl for Win32', mentioned in some older Perl docs, was a completely separate port - however, the 'core Perl' port has merged with
ActivePerl, which is now the official Windows port of Perl.
See also
CygWin Perl (which is much more similar to Unix Perl, though
ActivePerl is close) and
WindowsInstallCookbook, which mainly covers Cygwin Perl with some detours for
ActivePerl.
Pro's and Con's
ActivePerl's benefits:
- Good integration with Windows, e.g. Win32::* and OLE access modules are included
- Easy download and install with Windows installer
Some drawbacks:
- Far fewer CPAN modules available for easy installation
- Because Perl for Windows requires a commercial C compiler from Microsoft, ActiveState have put together a separate module installer (PPM) and repository, enabling binary modules (including some compiled C) to be installed using the PPM command. The downside of this is that modules must be re-packaged, so in many cases you actually need to do more work to install modules than on Unix, even for modules not including C extensions.
- Some interesting bugs - same can be said of CygWin Perl, it depends on your project as to which is best (have had show stoppers on both)
- No fork, only 'fork emulation' - this has some limitations (see
perldoc perlfork
) and the whole fork/exec area is not as good as CygWin
Module repositories
Useful
PPM Repositories:
Assuming you are using
ActivePerl 5.8 (i.e. build 800 or higher), you can add a repository to the list searched by
PPM as follows:
- Run
ppm
from a Windows shell (cmd.exe
)
- Type
repository add fredrepository http://fred-great-repository.com/ppms/
- Type
repository
or rep
to list repositories
This repository list is saved across sessions.
Manual package installation
If you can't find a
PPM package you can use the
'manual way' section of WindowsInstallCookbook - just remember to type
nmake
instead of
make
. You can find Microsoft's nmake on the Net, typically available from
Google:microsoft+nmake+download.
--
RichardDonkin - 10 Jan 2005