ActiveState has discontinued the Perl Dev Kit. It is no longer available for purchase, and support has ended. ActiveState shifted focus to a different commercial model (the ActiveState Platform, with build automation and dependency resolution).
This is not native compilation. Performance is virtually identical to running the original script through perl interpreter.pl . The advantage is deployment, not speed. Perl Dev Kit -PDK-
Perl source code is plain text. If you send a .pl file to a client, they can read your business logic, database credentials, and algorithms. The PDK's tool obfuscates code into an intermediate representation that is human-unreadable but functionally identical. ActiveState has discontinued the Perl Dev Kit