I have a Windows 10 system with limited storage space - and am looking for an implementation of perl that will take up as little space on the disk as possible.
I've been using Strawberry Perl - which uses about 500 MB.
My perl needs are minimal, but I may need to install a couple of cpan modules.
I found a "Tiny Perl" on SourceForge - but it hasn't been touched in years - so I'm reluctant to even try it.
Can anyone recommend a good solution here?
Thanks.
The Perl installed with Strawberry Perl, including all core and vendor modules and a few I installed myself, weighs in at 140 MB. When you say it uses 500 MB, you're including the build toolchain required to install modules in your total (e.g. gmake, mingw, etc). This is something added by Strawberry and isn't part of Perl, and isn't required in day-to-day use of Perl.
Similarly, not all of that 140 MB is needed by everyone. A chunk of that is also part of the toolchain required for installing modules (e.g. ExtUtils::MakeMaker, etc).
To get a smaller footprint, you could build your own Perl, or keep only the perl/ subdir of a SP install, and surgically remove core modules you don't want from that.
For example, you could install SP (along with any modules you want) on a machine with sufficient disk space, then copy over just the perl/ subdir (minus the modules you want to omit) to the limited machine.
In determining what modules to remove, you could consult any of a number of linux distros that split Perl into a base package and the remainder.
