I think at this point, Strawberry Perl is the one to go with. While historically vanilla perl was more up to date (due to simplicity in testing a minimal bundle) that's no longer an issue and vanilla perl appears dead.
I have significant experience with Strawberry Perl (and before that Vanilla Perl) and so here's how it fits into your bullet points.
This is a native build.
While it does not come with pre-built libraries outside of the core libraries, CPAN::Bundle
, and a few others, it comes with a complete build environment based on Mingw. My general experience is that most CPAN modules work out of the box and you can install them just by running something like: cpan Wx
(and have it download, compile, and install Wxperl
and Wxwidgets
). There are however some modules I haven't been able to make run properly (LaTeX::Driver
, for example, fails make test with what look like harmless issues comparing paths, and Template::Latex
doesn't seem to work even if you force install). Those are a relatively small minority though.
Currently, 5.18 is supported, with 5.16 available as well.
So I am not quite sure whether this meets your needs. If you have to support most of CPAN and find a build environment to be intolerable, you probably need to look elsewhere, but if having a good, tested build environment is good enough, I would highly recommend it. It is the one I go to any time I need to deploy a Perl application on Windows.