I've just committed an initial patch that allows Pike to be compiled using mingw32. To compile pike using mingw32, you will have to do the following:
1) Install the latest mingw32-dist 2) Install Msys 3) Install the mingw Win32 API update 4) Install GMP (either from source or bin package) 5) Install Nettle (untested! I've been using --without-nettle for the time beeing...) 6) Get a Pike 7.7 source snapshot (or build one yourself). Building from CVS under mingw32 seems to break due to some cr/lf problem, so build the source-dist on a unix box. 7) Set the PIKE_PATH_TRANSLATE to some sed-command which translates the master-paths from you MSYS installation to the regular NT-CMD filesystem(*). 8) Do "make configure" to configure your buildtree. 9) Do "make" do build pike. 10) (optional) Do "make verify". This will fail, the hard way.. ;( 11) You should now have a pike which is usable to some extent. I havn't tested it much, but I've done some simple tests and it seems to hold up fairly well.
(*) I build from my home-dir, /home/SSS668. To create a working master, I need to translate that path to c:/msys/1.0/home/SSS668. You need to do the same using some creative sed-command or accept that your build will fail when it attepmts to build post_modules. You can modify the master manually if you like. Look for the ¤-sign to find what places to modify.
So, there it is. Now you should know what you need to build. I believe that Mingw32 is the easiest way to get Pike to compile on Win32. However, I'm not so certain it is the best choice since there seems to be quite a few compatibility issues between mingw32 and the win32 api (as MS provides it). I have access to both at work and they do not match in several places.
I believe that we should try to get Pike to work with mingw first, and then start working towards MSVC native compilation. However, there will still be the problem of configuring the build. It may be that we always will need a msys-layer to run configure.