Perhaps you should look at the Cygwin project as a possible interim measure. The Cygwin project, from their own page, "is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality (, and a ) collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel." Among other things, it includes the gcc compiler, and currently, perl 5.6.1.

I have used it before, and it can be a fairly usable facility if you don't want (or can't, at the moment) to move to an *nix system.

Update: My response was to, "Any suggestions on how I can make the most out of my present system, at least until I outfit with a *nix OS?" I greatly appreciated Marza's comment about the platform being just a tool. Flames or no, everyone has an environment they work best in-if that is win*ows or *nix or whatever, the goal should be to make the individual as productive and the environment as usable for the individual as possible.

In reply to Re: Perl hacker’s tools of trade or hardware of choice.. by atcroft
in thread Perl hacker’s tools of trade or hardware of choice.. by vladb

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