Yes, thanks for clarifying that.

An XS author writes XS, which is sorta-C with a lot of Perl framework. This gets compiled down to actual-C, and then to a library (.so, .dll, etc), which is loaded by perl using DynaLoader or XSLoader.

Writing XS can be somewhat of a pain; there's boilerplate, cargo-cult, Perl guts/API stuff, and enough C to give one the impression of knowing what's going on. A module like Inline::C aims to reduce the boilerplate, and automate some of the process. The upcoming Inline::Module will further improve upon Inline by allowing Inline-authored distributions to ship with no Inline dependency.

But Inline:: is really an automation tool to produce the common-case XS with less fuss.