Is Perl a good option for writing platform independent desktop applications?

Question

Is Perl a good option for writing (possibly and partially) platform independent desktop applications? I know there are interesting widget libraries like GTK2 Perl and wxWidgets but I'm not familiar with development on Windows.

Is it possible to write a good application with Perl and those tools, maybe embedding everything needed to avoid asking the user to install external (and probably non conventional for many) libraries? Are there examples of this kind of apps around?

Answer 1

Sort of. You can certainly write Perl scripts that provide a Tk GUI that will work on any platform, and you can even package the libraries they need to work with PAR to put together an application that will run anywhere with an appropriate version of perl installed without requiring the end use to install a bunch of stuff from CPAN to get it to work.

However, an application that will run anywhere without requiring an existing perl installation (and it's probably not safe to assume the average Windows user will have perl) isn't really viable. One solution would be to distribute an "everywhere but Windows" version that simply uses PAR to include the necessary libraries, and a PAR::Packer-built version for Windows, which would be a fully-functional .exe including the perl interpreter and the libraries.

EDIT: following daotoad's response, it does appear that ActiveState's PerlApp can build cross-platform binaries for for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and AIX; I haven't tried this but if it works as advertised it would seem to meet your requirements.