Strawberry Perl is a distribution of the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

for the Microsoft Windows platform. Additionally, strawberry contains a fully featured

Mingw-w64 Mingw-w64 is a free and open source software development environment to create (cross-compile) Microsoft Windows PE applications. It was forked in 2005–2010 from MinGW (''Minimalist GNU for Windows''). Mingw-w64 includes a port of the GNU ...

C/C++ compiler with many libraries included. While most other distributions rely on the user having software development tools already set up to install certain Perl components, Strawberry Perl ships with the most commonly used tools preconfigured and packaged. It is a dramatic departure from other Perl distributions, and has influenced other distributions (such as its primary rival, the freely available but closed source

ActivePerl ActivePerl is a distribution of Perl from ActiveState (formerly part of Sophos) for Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. A few main editions are available, including: Community (free, for development use only), and several paid tiers u ...

distribution released by

ActiveState ActiveState Software Inc is a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It develops, sells, and supports cross-platform development tools for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, as well ...

) to provide such development tools in their own distribution.

Rationale

Through the

CPAN The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. ''CPAN'' can denote eit ...

, Perl users can download any of a vast number of prepackaged modules. Many of these modules can be installed in any Perl environment; however, certain modules (XS modules) require a working

C compiler This page is intended to list all current compilers, compiler generators, interpreters, translators, tool foundations, assemblers, automatable command line interfaces ( shells), etc. Ada Compilers ALGOL 60 compilers ALGOL 68 compilers cf. ...

and development environment to install successfully. Most Perl distributions assume that such an environment - which is usually provided with most

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

systems - already exists; however, Windows does not come with a C compiler and the required development environment, and these must be installed separately by the user or the administrator. However, Strawberry Perl incorporates the

MinGW MinGW ("Minimalist GNU for Windows"), formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. MinGW includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows ...

development environment during installation. All the installed Perl tools are set up to use these built-in libraries and development tools to compile XS modules as required. This allows Strawberry Perl to use many XS modules without modification, directly from the CPAN.

Packaged tools

, Strawberry Perl consists of: * A Perl distribution * A

distribution, consisting of gcc, ld, gmake and other

binutils The GNU Binary Utilities, or , are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code. Tools They were originally written by programmers at Cygnus Solutions. ...

. * Windows installation scripts to allow Strawberry Perl to be easily uninstalled. * Various non-standard but widely used Perl modules. These mostly relate to ease of installation of further extensions from the

, but also include various tools that enhance the ability to install packages from other sources such as the

Perl Archive Toolkit Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR) is a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for computer applications and libraries written in the Perl programming language. Its name is inspired by Java's JAR (file format) technology. It was originally developed ...

, the Perl package manager and the Perl Installation Program.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official website

Perl software