For a long time now I've been saying to anyone that would listen that the only thing preventing Perl from being a good language for desktop development was a lack of decent library support, and a lack of decent tools to make development relatively efficient.

With Padre, we've certainly gone a long way towards demonstrating that building large desktop applications in Perl is possible, and the stresses caused by Padre on it's underlying libraries has driven the improvement of Perl support for the dominant cross-platform GUI toolkit wxWidgets.

With library support relatively matu…