Differences:

* Actually Portable Perl runs on more operating systems, StaticPerl runs on Linux i386 (requiring i686 or newer processor), Linux amd64 and FreeBSD with Linux emulation.

* Actually Portable Perl has more of the standard Perl modules and C extensions bundled. StaticPerl contains only a few modules, simplified, with documentation and non-Linux support removed. StaticPerl is unlikely to work with existing Perl scripts with many use calls, but it is useful to write new Perl scripts from scratch, and these scripts will work with both StaticPerl and regular Perl.

* Actually Portable Perl executable programs are larger (5 MB minimum, StaticPerl is ~1 MB) because they are compiled for amd64 rather than i386, and they contain more Perl and C code.

* The first time an Actually Portable Perl executable program is run, it modifies a few bytes at the beginning of the program file (except on Windows). Thus these programs don't work on read-only filesystems unless they have been run on a read-write filesystem first. StaticPerl doesn't have this limitation.

It's linked from the page, but thought I'd point out if you're curious what went into making APPerl, check out the blogpost (self-plug): https://computoid.com/posts/Perl-is-Actually-Portable.html

a distribution of Perl the runs on several x86_64 operating systems (most Unix-like and Windows) via the same binary

Unix and Windows in the same binary?? Sacrilege! Haven't we still laws against witchcraft?

But the fact is: it gets shit done. It’s pretty good at dealing with strings and byte sequences, and even more importantly, it’s always fucking installed,

The “best” software helps you nothing if you’re machine isn’t running it.

An interesting effort and article from around 2001: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0003.html

And an old Perlmonks discussion on a 850kb Perl: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=222465

There is a newer github project as well -- it did work for a simple project with core modules for me: https://github.com/bentxt/microperl-standalone

Shame there isn't a portable windowing toolkit you could use with this. I'm pretty sure it's not possible to get the Qt or GTK bindings to work across all platforms from a single install, even if you are using the toolkit's widgets instead of trying to use the platform native widgets.

Does this support musl?