Comment by marttt

I wonder why microperl or miniperl didn't really take off. Would be a nice thing to have -- just a single-executable-perl with the basics and file i/o, alongside awk, Lua or any other tiny language.

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