zebedee,
Actually no - even that has problems. First, you need to be able to introduce a compiler. Of course this doesn't need to be the production environment but there is still a change control process that must be adhered to. The next problem you will face is that compiling C extensions for Perl using a compiler other than the one that compiled Perl usually doesn't work. This means either recompiling Perl or creating a stand alone executable and using system calls. These both have the same problems. Keep in mind that I fully recognize that these hurdles are not technical and are quite silly but one has to choose what they want to spend their time doing.