Re: miniperl: where explained?

On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 9:06 PM, James E Keenan <jke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> If I 'ack' for miniperl, I find it referenced many times.  But none of those> references seems to be a straightforward explanation of what it is, what it> is used for, what its limitations are, etc.?>> Do we have such documentation?

Not that I know of, though here's what I said in perlvms.pod and these
two sentences are not really platform-specific:

F<Miniperl.Exe> is an executable image which contains all of
the basic functionality of Perl, but cannot take advantage of
Perl XS extensions and has a hard-wired list of library locations
for loading pure-Perl modules.  It is used extensively to build and
test Perl and various extensions, but is not installed.


It should really probably say "dynamically-loaded" XS extensions.  Was
there something in particular you wanted to know about miniperl?  If
it's just curiosity, the main point of interest may be the fact that
the core Perl build uses a slimmed-down version of Perl extensively in
the build and test process.