Yes. There is a real need. Beleive me, I wouldn't be banging my head on this particular brick wall just for fun :)

A few reasons: I am hoping that the fixes in this build will allow me to make progress on a couple of projects I had to suspend because the 5.8.0 threads support was flakey.

I would like to be able to use Inline::C for a couple of things where I can't extract the requisiste performance from pure perl.

I also have a couple of ideas for patches to the perl source for which I need to be able to build the latest version perl.

I get antsy reading about all the great new features available in the latest builds but having to wait for AS to do their thing and release their build of it, which usually happens just before the cycle repeats itself:)