Thank you for your response. In spite of not
making the test suite, I gave it (Inline::CPP) a try. First
Program, as described in the Examples compiled,
but segfaulted the perl core on program return with:

 Free to wrong pool 235e38 not b01f4.
[download]

Another test, using an already compiled library and an include path for using the respective functions, like:

 use strict;
 use warnings;

 use Inline 'CPP';
 use Inline CPP => Config
                => INC => '/I C:\\some\\tools\\' 
                => LIBS => '/libpath:"C:\\some\\tools\\bin"'
                => LIBS => 'important.lib'
               ;
 my $n = ask_important_lib('question');
 print $n;
__END__
__CPP__

 #include "important.h"

 int ask_important_lib(char* question)
{
 SOMECLASS var(question);
 if( var.errorstatus() ) {
    printf("we got an error %d on question %s!\n", var.errorstatus(), 
+question);
    return -1;
 }
 return 1;
}
[download]

The above wouldn't even start to compile, nmake (1.5) will complain:

 ...
 makefile(878) : fatal error U1083: target macro '$(OBJECT)' expands t
+o nothing
 ...
[download]

So I throwed the towel. This seems to be completely non-workable on anything non-trivial C++ problem.

BTW: I tried similar w/Ruby's RubyInline on
Ruby 1.9 - also w/Visual C++ 6.

Almost the same result. Some trivial things work,
but anything referencing external include files
or libs won't work (at least with Visual C++ 6, the
system the actual Ruby 1.9.1 binary for win32 is built).

Thanks & regards

mwa