My best instincts tell me that you should dispense with Open Watcom and grab a compiler (preferably either MSVC++ 6.0 or MinGW) that's known to work with ActivePerl and is well supported (wrt ActivePerl).

Given what you say WRT the DIR macro, there's a better than even chance that you're right.

I take it you have your own XS modules that you need to compile ? Otherwise you could just make use of the PPM utility to install pre-compiled builds of the CPAN modules.

Yep - we've got 2 tools both of which are provided with a C++ API ... I've searched high & low for perl wrappers for the APIs ... to no avail :-( hence the question.