SUMMARY: Using obfuscators is the only option! (Score 1)

There are no options besides obfuscation. Consider the following:

1. perlcc to compiled code doesn't work for compiling to C for most of code (and generates 5-10Mb of C code that compiles for 10 minutes by gcc) and result doesn't work almost all of the time. Output of 'perlcc -B' can be reversed using B::Deparse..

2. ActiveState PerlApp just extracts all your project's files to a temporary directory during execution of your "compiled" code. Just copy them from there, with all comments and documentation. Simply LOL. Why nobody is sueing ActiveState for this?

3. Using PAR even with --filter option produces rather readable code, that doesn't work most of the time for real projects.

4. Using perl2exe is questionable due to existnance of exe2perl (search on google for it). If it won't work for current version of perl2exe, memory dump of running process should do the trick and one will get cleartext of your scripts with comments and everything.

The only reliable and unreversable solution is the use of obfuscator - like Stunnix Perl-Obfus. Obfuscators replace names of variables and functions (and other names like names of file handles) with some random-generated identifiers (this is one-way function, it can't be reversed), also removing comments, white spaces and replacing strings and integers with expressions or their uglified versions.