automake+cygwin+VisualC++ compiler set

[Wolfgang Liebich <liebichw at pca209 dot erd dot siemens dot at>]

Hi,
Maybe I should have written "to dream the impossible dream" into the 
subject", but hey...
I and a colleague are  currently working on porting a UNIX daemon program to 
WindowsNT. The daemon has been developed with an eye towards portability 
(currently it runs under 3 flavours of UNIX), and automake/autoconf has been 
extensively used for Makefile creation and portable header file developement. 
The Program strives to only use the ANSI C++-Standard features (it makes 
rather heavy use of STL - but at least with gcc/g++ and at worst STLPort this 
should not be a problem).
For the WindowsNT port I see four options:
a) Cygwin+gcc: This should be the least problematic, as Cygwin strives to 
emulate UNIX as much as possible. Oh, and it's not necessary for the program 
to run as a service - at least not at first, a ordinary console app should be 
sufficient.
b) MinGW+CYGWIN: I didn't get this to work as I wanted to. Right now I didn't 
have the time to research the reason of this problem.
c) MinGW  cross compiler Linux->WinNT. The question for me is - how stable is 
this cross compiler? Looks a little dangerous to me...
d) Cygwin+automake/autoconf generate a Makefile fit for GNU make, but the 
compiler/linker etc. used are the MS tools. This is IMHO the best solution, 
b/c I've consistently heard that the VisualC++ compiler produced the smallest 
and/or fastest executables of the three possibilities 
Cygwin/MinGW/VisualStudio.
Sooo - has someone managed to do just that - use Automake/autoconf in 
conjunction with the MS tools? 
And yes, I do know that the IDE will not work with GNU makefiles. That's not 
a problem...
TIA,
Wolfgang Liebich