If I could ++ you more than once for suggesting MinGW and MSYS, I would do that ... but don't get too excited - the only good things about the Cygwin project are that:

a) it produced MSYS;
b) it's possible to cross-compile on Cygwin for native Win32 (but why would one bother when one can simply build for native Win32 using MSYS anyway)

And I take issue (but in a totally non-hostile way) with the notion that MSYS is a "light-weight option".

Note that Strawberry Perl comes with *most* of MinGW (g77 is missing, as someone recently complained) ... so it's really just a case of recommending Strawberry Perl plus MSYS :-)

Cheers,
Rob