I think you might be educating me here ... I downloaded the Perl binary for 5.8.8 from ActiveState. This is the Perl that I am running and trying to build XS based modules in. Are you telling me that I must use the same compiler as ActiveState used to generate the binary? If so, how do I know what compiler they used?

I'm not sure I completely understand if this is true. While running 5.6, I would routinely create XS modules using C++ code. Typically I would compile using gcc. But Perl is compiled using some C compiler i.e. not gcc. I thought the XS generated library just created machine code and that the typemap dealt with passing data to and from the C/Perl object to your C++/XS object.

I think you might be educating me here ... I downloaded the Perl binary for 5.8.8 from ActiveState. This is the Perl that I am running and trying to build XS based modules in. Are you telling me that I must use the same compiler as ActiveState used to generate the binary?

In general, this is true, since the module build process will try to use compilers/linkers/options determined when perl was built. I know solaris has stuff to allow building modules with gcc via Solaris-PerlGcc, and recent ActiveState Win32 perl is supposed to also allow building modules with MinGW's gcc. But I don't know about ActiveState's Solaris perl or how any of those bandaids work with C++ modules.

I'd really recommend building your own perl, perhaps starting with the Configure options given by perl -V:config_args on the perl you are using now. Also note that not many people build C++ modules, so IIRC that occasionally has been broken.

How are you building your module now? It's starting to sound to me like you have your own makefile rather than having ExtUtils::MakeMaker build one; if so, you can expect breakage whenever perl's Config changes.

I build them the usual way (I think). I run "h2xs -A -n MODULE_NAME". You have to make several edits to the files in the module to make them C++ compatible. This includes adding an XSOPT => '-C++' line to Makefile.PL. So the answer to the second question is that I am using MakeMaker, I just have to make a few changes to Makefile.PL. There is a good summary of the processs here: http://www.johnkeiser.com/perl-xs-c++.html I have tried to build my own Perl binary but I am having considerable problems. Let me run this by you and see what you think though ... in the past when this worked, I compiled using gcc. But for some unknown reason, gcc is broken at my site. So I have been using Sun's CC compiler instead. I wonder if this isn't the source of my problem?