I don't know what capabilities there are to detect whether C compilation is available.

Generally, however, the user will know - and might want to skip the C compilation even when a compiler is available, for whatever reason. So my inclination would be to let the user choose, and to concentrate on providing good error messages if you can't do what they ask you to (and at most a warning if you think what they've asked for isn't the best option for them).

For what it's worth, one of my recent maths projects (written in C) is being run by a number of people on Windows, but despite several of them being programmers only one of them was prepared to actually compile the code (who then provided a binary I could distribute to the others) - even while some of them were asking for features that were already available as compile-time options. I do not pretend to understand this, but I think I can reasonably conclude that some people have a complicated relationship with the concept of a compiler.

In reply to Re^3: How to author a module with optional XS by hv
in thread How to author a module with optional XS by NERDVANA

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