If I were to ditch Visual Studio 2008, and go with MinGW, how do I set up the environment?

You would just delete Visual Studio 2008 (or at least remove it from the path) and run ppm install MinGW. Nothing else needs to be done - MinGW and dmake will be installed and and made locatable, so you're right to go. (However, things might be stuffed up if Visual Studio is also getting found.)

If anyone here has tried both MS VisualStudio and the gcc tools to compile Perl modules specifically for Win32, which do you prefer and why?

Unless you're using the same compiler that was used to build ActivePerl (which is Visual Studio 6.0 for x86 builds of ActivePerl) you're better off with MinGW, imo. The reason is that MinGW uses the same C runtime (msvcrt.dll) as Visual Studio 6.0, so there's no mixing of C runtimes going on. In some situations, this is quite crucial.

If you really want to use Visual Studio 2008 as your compiler, you should build perl with that compiler.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re: Compiling modules for win32 ActivePerl by syphilis
in thread Compiling modules for win32 ActivePerl by desemondo

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