Let me restate my previous point.

I'm NOT saying that it isn't a good thing to support more compilers. Playing well with others is a GOOD thing.

And most of this grant is not about adding MinGW compatibility, because almost everything works already anyway.

This grant is firstly about fixing things in Bundle::CPAN that don't work, or have major bugs, on any Win32 platform, Vanilla or Strawberry or ActivePerl or otherwise.

Because there's a lot of bugs for things as simple as Term::ReadLine::Perl, or that to relate to the fact CPAN.pm doesn't play well with the Windows firewall. All the normal portability and platform-specific stuff.
And the second part is fixes to deal with other secondary problems that have emerged because the bulk of Windows users currently don't need to use CPAN, and a few bug fixes to remove assumptions caused by CPAN authors treating ActivePerl bundled modules as if they are in the core and thus not listing those dependencies in their (Makefile|Build).PL

That's what THIS grant is about. IT's about making all the modules in the Perl toolchain intrinsically sane on Windows.

This doesn't invalidate the importance of adding support for newer and different compilers. But it is a mostly orthogonal task, and so it would be the subject of a different grant.

And in the process, this grant creates an option for people to use a Perl distribution that is both simple to install, without requiring a knowledge of C, and entirely libre from the compiler on up.

Because I for one don't write C, can't stand Visual Studio, and just want my Perl modules to install, without having to care about C compilers.