Which one is better, Active state or Strawberry Perl ?

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi Monks, I am new to perl. Which Perl should i download, Active state otr strawberry. I heard that in Active state Perl some modules dono support ot having Issues with Installation. So Can you pls recoment me which one to Use. Thanks.

[marto]

Both ActiveState and Strawberry Perl support module installation via PPM and cpan as standard. Strawberry Perl ships with a C compiler and build tools as part of the distribution. With ActiveState you need to install these via PPM (ppm MinGW).

I prefer Strawberry Perl for the reason that it has everything I need as standard, meaning I can use it on systems which don't have internet access. I keep it and a cpan archive (created with CPAN::Mini) on my phone which I can transfer via USB or wifi to target systems.

[Athanasius]

This website: http://www.perl.org/get.html is a good place to start. From the second paragraph:

We recommend that you always run the latest stable version, currently 5.16.2.

In light of this advice, you may wish to consider the most recent versions available in the various Perl-for-Windows distributions:

Name	Website	Perl Version
DWIM Perl for Windows	http://dwimperl.com/windows.html	5.14.2.1 (Strawberry Perl)
Cygwin	http://www.cygwin.com/	5.14.2-3
ActiveState ActivePerl	http://www.activestate.com/activeperl	5.16.1
Citrus Perl	http://www.citrusperl.com/	5.16.1
Strawberry Perl	http://strawberryperl.com/releases.html	5.16.2.1

Hope that helps,

[ikegami]

Only some of those are Perl versions. If you want that table to be useful, only use Perl versions in the Perl Version column.

[Athanasius]

I don’t understand. All the versions given are indeed the versions of Perl included in the distributions.

All the versions may be easily verified via the links given, except for the Cygwin version, for which it is necessary to run setup.exe.

Or am I missing something?

[afoken]

Sigh. Define "better".

For me, Strawberry is better on Windows, because it comes with a compiler and a sufficient make variant, so I can install XS modules simply using the cpan utility. I don't need any of the extras and the "walled garden" offered by ActiveState. Still, perl on Linux or any other Unix is way better than any perl on Windows for me, because I don't have to work around Windows' limitations there.

Alexander

[karlgoethebier]

"Still, perl on Linux or any other Unix is way better than any perl on Windows for me, because I don't have to work around Windows' limitations there".

True, but this doesn't help if the seeker can't Linux or doesn't want it for any reason. Perhaps the customer prefers Microsoft products.

Regards, Karl

[marquezc329]

Suggested Reading:
• Which is better: ActiveState or Strawberry Perl?
• Which Win32 distribution of Perl should I use: ActiveState, Strawberry, or both?
• strawberry vs activestate perl

[Anonymous Monk]

It doesn't matter, you can even use both (provided you don't diddle the registry -- use one if you don't know what that means )

I kinda like http://www.citrusperl.com/ :)

Oh boy, I just threw a 3rd choice at you, uh-oh

[Anonymous Monk]

I have Perl version 10 which was from Strawberry. If I'm not wrong, I'm able to use both cpan and ppm to install modules with this version.

Recently, I downloaded Perl version 14 again from Strawberry. I discovered I could not use ppm, only cpan. When I tried to install a module using cpan, I got lots of errors which I didn't understand.

So I went to ActiveState and downloaded version 14. I was able to install a couple of modules using ppm.

[Anonymous Monk]

figures, 64 and 32 bits don't mix, neither does not knowing how to install libraries

[space_monk]

Cygwin

[karlgoethebier]

Imagine you have a customer using Microsoft products. And then tell the admins: "Hi folks, use Cygwin, it's good. I did all the stuff for your company using Cygwin and it works fine". Shure, Cygwin is good, but they will look at the installer and freeze. Give them ActiveState and they will feel good.

Regards, Karl

[space_monk]

...was my joke flying over your head :-)

[Anonymous Monk]

As noted in the links provided ... define "better" for you. And, be able to say why.