It's a valid point. The last time I tried MinGW, it was version 2 and I was attempting to build 5.6.1. I downloaded MinGW-3.0.0-rc4 whilst I was sleeping with the intention of trying this out on 5.8.1. I just haven't got to that yet, but will once the glee of having achieved the Borland build begins to wear off.

Essentially, I had gotten much further with Borland previously so it was a no-brainer to try that first this time around. Using MinGW would be preferable in at least some ways to Borland. Having access to the sources of the runtime libraries mean that if (for example) the large file support was missing, then I could more easily correct that than with the Borland stuff. I haven't tried to pull apart and reassemble a .dll in a long time, which is what I would probably need to do to fix the Borland CRT.