Programming Perl, 3rd Edition

Extending Perl (Using C from Perl)

If you want to use C source code (or a C library) from Perl, you need to create a library that can be either dynamically loaded or statically linked into your perl executable. (Dynamic loading is usually preferred, to minimize the number of different perl executables sitting around being different.) You create that library by creating an XS file (ending in .xs) containing a series of wrapper subroutines. The wrapper subroutines are not Perl subroutines, however; they are in the XS language, and we call such a subroutine an XSUB, for "eXternal SUBroutine". An XSUB can wrap a C function from an external library, a C function elsewhere in the XS file, or naked C code in the XSUB itself. You then use the xsubpp utility bundled with Perl to take the XS file and translate it into C code that can be compiled into a library that Perl will understand.

Assuming your operating system supports dynamic linking, the end result will be a Perl module that behaves like any other module written in 100% pure Perl, but runs compiled C code under the hood. It does this by pulling arguments from Perl's argument stack, converting the Perl values to the formats expected by a particular C function (specified through an XSUB declaration), calling the C function, and finally transferring the return values of the C function back to Perl. These return values may be passed back to Perl either by putting them on the Perl stack or by modifying the arguments supplied from the ...