in reply to Compiling modules for win32 ActivePerl

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Compiling modules for win32 ActivePerl
by desemondo (Hermit) on Oct 01, 2009 at 09:06 UTC
    thanks for the encouragement - i've gone with MinGW as you suggested. I don't think I persisted with MinGW long enough. Due to the vast amount of other material saying that you should use an MS compiler if using ActiveState I think I gave in too easily.

    ... so there's no mixing of C runtimes going on. In some situations, this is quite crucial.
    Is this what caused the earlier issue when compiling with VS? ie. Because my Perl wasn't built with Visual Studio it was missing some thing(s)?

    ah, well still got a lot more to learn here.
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom