Some blue sky thinking... FFI::Platypus is a libffi interface for Perl. You could modify SWIG to produce pure Perl glue code targeting FFI::Platypus instead of producing XS. Then you only need to worry about having FFI::Platypus installed on customer systems. But it would only solve the problem if 1) someone wrote a SWIG backend (some months of work) and 2) FFI::Platypus is easy to install (haven't checked).