title: Languages that Windows supports out of the box
body: <p>I have been asked to write a (very) simple program for a set of Windows machines (XP I think) - so simple that the choice of language isn't really an issue.  However, I want to be able to distribute a binary/script that will run straight away on the Windows machine, without the need to pre-install any interpretor or virtual machine.  I'm developing on a Linux machine and I have no idea what languages Windows supports 'out of the box'.  Can anyone advise?</p>
  
  <p>For example</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Perl would be great but I don't believe windows machines come with Perl pre-installed?  Asking the user to install Perl to use my script is not acceptable.</li>
  <li>I believe Python has the same problem? (although maybe I can use the PyInstaller? -- <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/2950971/498253">as in this question</a>)</li>
  <li>Likewise Java? Is the virtual machine pre-installed on most Windows distributions? (I understand it got removed after a dispute with Sun Microsystems?)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The only option I can think of so far is </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>c/c++ with MinGW cross-compiler.  </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>While I'm happy to write the code in c++, I wanted  to check my language options first.</p>