OK, so I ended up having to switch my OS back to Windows because DragonflyBSD couldn't support the Android SDK properly (I am also trying to work with Freenet on Android as a side project), and therefore I needed to install Cygwin, and because of that I decided to give building the SpecC reference compiler another go. This time it worked! I had very few of the previous bugs to deal with on cygwin, so I am a happy camper indeed. A lucky break for me....