Addendum: I just re-read your post, and realised that I had left one of your questions unanswered.

Besides, what namely you are trying to achieve by trying Borland build?

What I am trying to achieve is parity! Parity with all the *nix users who build their own copies of perl using free compilers. I want to have all the same benefits and privileges that they enjoy.

• I want to be able to use Inline::C, Inline::asm et al.
• I want to have the ability to build my own modules with XS and C components and not be dependant on others. PodMaster is a great guy, but he is easily pissed off:)
• I want to be able to use the latest versions of perl as they become available and not wait 6 months for AS to do their thing.
• I want to be able to apply patches that the p5p guys come up with for the bugs I raise and try them out so that I can do the right thing by their efforts and confirm that their patches work for me.

Most of all, I think that just because I choose (and others are forced) to use Win32 as my OS, I don't see why my only choices for using perl are:

1. Use a binary distribution with all of the limitations that implies.
2. Have to adopt Cygwin in order to build using gcc. If I wanted to use *nix, I would install Linux. Cygwin, from my perspective is the worst of both worlds. Like driving a left-hand drive car in a right-hand drive country, but doing it from the passenger seat.
3. Put more money into the coffers of MS by buying their compiler. I choose to use Win32, but my copy of NT was paid for a very long time ago. My choice of preferred platform does not translate into a love for that company. I am as aware of their business practices as the next man, and for personal reasons, perhaps more aware than most. I have no desire to add to their wealth or condone their business practices by making new purchases from them, even if I could afford to which is debatable.

For my purposes, the compiler that Borland kindly make available to the community for free is just fine. It does everything I need it to quite competently with the exception of large file support, which I have patched my way around for perl and will probably get around to fixing at the libraries level at some point.

I did try using MinGW for a while, but the build process for that seems even more broken than for Borland.

I will be trying to get my patches accepted back into the perl build tree so that others might also benefit (if only I can find a version of diff that can handle diff'ing two 5000+ line files without forcing my system into swapping by consuming 200+ MB of memory before I got fed up and killed it :().