The problem is that a) the bindings are hard to understand and b) my code leaks memory as hell. But I took almost everything more or less directly from man perlembed and man perlguts, thus it can't be _that_ wrong...
BTW: this is a cooked down version for you, fellow Monks, that doesn't leak as much as the original which has some SVs and stuff, but still ... it leaks :(

I post the code right below, but a quick word of warning: yes, it's C ;-)

/* compile with */
/* gcc -o monk monk.c `perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts -e ldopts` */

/* I tried this under Perl 5.6.0 and perl 5.005_3 */
   
# include <stdio.h>
# include <EXTERN.h>
# include <perl.h>
# include <unistd.h>

void call_perl();

int main(int argc, char **argv, char **env)
{
   /* That's OK: */
   printf("Testing perl embedding\n");
   call_perl();

   /* But in a loop we leak as hell */
   while (1) {
      call_perl();
      sleep(1);
   }
}

void call_perl(void) {

   static PerlInterpreter *my_perl;
   char *embedding[] = { "", "-e", "0" };
   
   my_perl = perl_alloc();
   perl_construct(my_perl);
   perl_parse(my_perl, NULL, 3, embedding, NULL);
   perl_run(my_perl);

   eval_pv("print \"Perl Version: $]\\n\"",TRUE);
   perl_destruct(my_perl);
   perl_free(my_perl);

}
[download]

Regards

Stefan K