Now pass an arbitrary chunk of Perl code to "perl -e" in a portable manner.

I was only demonstrating that windows supported backticks, not championing the idea of using them and -e as a useful mechanism.

Capture both STDOUT and STDERR from it. Not so trivial.

Capturing stderr also is trivial:

C:\test>perl -E"say `perl -c -Mstrict -we\"my \$l = 365.25*\" 2>&1` "
syntax error at -e line 1, at EOF
-e had compilation errors.
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But I would have thought feeding the code to a piped-open and checking the exit code would suffice if all that is required is a yay or nay.

And if you need to actually capture the error messages produced, then this might do the trick:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Win32::Socketpair qw[ winopen2_5 ];

my( $pid, $sock ) = winopen2_5( 'perl.exe', '-c' );

print $sock <<'EOP';
my $x = 365.25**3;
my $y = qx[ perl -c -e"say 'boo'"; ];
my $z = sub {
    print $sock <<;
    my $x = 365.25**3;
    my $y = qx[ perl -c -e"say 'boo'"; ];
    my $z = sub {
        print $sock <<;
        my $x = 365.25**3;
        my $y = qx[ perl -c -e"say 'boo'"; ];
        my $z = sub {
            1;
        };
    };
};
EOP
shutdown $sock, 1;
print while <$sock>;
close $sock;

( $pid, $sock ) = winopen2_5( 'perl.exe', q[-E"say 'hello'; warn; die;
+"] );
shutdown $sock, 1;
print while <$sock>;
close $sock;

__END__
C:\test>winopen2_5
- syntax OK

Warning: something's wrong at -e line 1.

Died at -e line 1.

hello
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