You are totally right about doing something more elegant with ExtUtils modules, we talked about it on chatterbox, but as a first go I was updating the quick getting started tutorial on the SWIG web site and wanted the commands to be similar to what they already had, but correct and working this time.

For Windows the tutorial wasn't covering that so just wanted to update what they already had which was for Unix/Linux

True not all people use gcc, but this is what they had in the tutorial so stuck with that and I believe they assumed if you don't have gcc you see what is going on and can easily map it to your particular cc and ld program.