I am trying to make an executable out of my perl code and then I realized that there is no such option available with the perl compiler. After a bit of searching, I found perlcc, which is a frontend for the perl compiler and does the job (produce a binary).
Why does perl have separate compiler and frontend? Like for example, gcc for C/C++ is a complete tool in itself. Is this just the way it is, or are there some good reasons behind it?
Perl programs aren't compiled as C programs are, they are parsed at runtime. All perlcc does is try to bundle up the perl executable and any libraries your program needs into one binary. At runtime, the script will still be interpreted, not run from the binary data.
Correction: It was a separate front-end. perl is not really a compiler to bytecode. The ultimate form of 'compiled' Perl is a set of abstract syntax trees that are then used by an interpreter. Perlcc support languished because the language changed fast enough that it never kept up. The problems it solved are mostly solvable in other ways that don't require constant maintenance of a separate source tree.
Because Perl 5 doesn't compile down to bytecode. Perl 6, on the other hand, can be compiled down to bytecode that runs on the Parrot virtual machine.
First, perlcc is a dead tool (although it is in the B::C distro. Virtually no one uses (or used) it. It's not part of the normal Perl development process. It's own docs say:
The code generated in this way is not guaranteed to work. The whole codegen suite (perlcc included) should be considered very experimental. Use for production purposes is strongly discouraged.
Furthermore, it's not typical for people to compile Perl programs to a binary. Plenty of people would like to do that, but that's just not the way it works. What are you trying to accomplish? There might be another way to do what you want to do.
A Perl program really executes in two phases: a compile-time and a run-time.
Perl is more like Java or Ruby than C in this manner. When you run a Perl program, the perl interpreter loads all the source code and compiles it into a abstract syntax tree. It's that bytecode that perl executes (or interprets) during the runtime. This is the same sort of thing that Java, Ruby, and Python do.
One of Perl's warts is that it doesn't have a good way to save the result of that compilation, like those other languages can. That means you end up compiling the source every time. There are some ways around that with pperl and domain-specific tools such as mod_perl or fastcgi.
There are some fuzzy bits in there with BEGIN blocks, eval, and so on, but that's mostly the way it works. There are more details in perlmod.
This design wart wouldn't be there if we started all over with everything we know now, and indeed, in Perl 6 it isn't there. :)