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CONTENTS

NAME

perlwin32 - Perl under Windows

SYNOPSIS

These are instructions for building Perl under Windows 7 and later.

DESCRIPTION

Before you start, you should glance through the README file found in the top-level directory to which the Perl distribution was extracted. Make sure you read and understand the terms under which this software is being distributed.

Also make sure you read "BUGS AND CAVEATS" below for the known limitations of this port.

The INSTALL file in the perl top-level has much information that is only relevant to people building Perl on Unix-like systems. In particular, you can safely ignore any information that talks about "Configure".

You may also want to look at one other option for building a perl that will work on Windows: the README.cygwin file, which give a different set of rules to build a perl for Windows. This method will probably enable you to build a more Unix-compatible perl, but you will also need to download and use various other build-time and run-time support software described in that file.

This set of instructions is meant to describe a so-called "native" port of Perl to the Windows platform. This includes both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. The resulting Perl requires no additional software to run (other than what came with your operating system). Currently, this port is capable of using one of the following compilers on the Intel x86 and x86_64 architectures:

Microsoft Visual C++    version 12.0 or later
Intel C++ Compiler      (experimental)
Gcc by mingw.org        gcc version 3.4.5-5.3.0
Gcc by mingw-w64.org    gcc version 4.4.3 or later

Note that the last two of these are actually competing projects both delivering complete gcc toolchain for MS Windows: