Wow, thanks! I've been looking at the 5.8.1 version of perlxs, which doesn't mention the automatic mortalization of RETVAL at all. It looks like that section was added in 5.8.4.

(Inline was written quite a while before this feature was documented, so maybe ingy didn't know about it and that's why the Inline::C documentation doesn't mention it?)

You'd think that not knowing about this would have caused me problems by now. The odd thing is, I've just looked over all my XS code and I don't seem to have run afoul of it anywhere. I suppose it helps that I usually use PPCODE instead of CODE.