AFAICT, there are two problems:

• the output of  `perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts -e ldopts` (in particular the -lperl therein) is inserted too early on the command line. As the linker (ld) by default only searches once to satisfy externally referenced symbols, the perl library didn't get included.

• when you load the shared lib using dlopen, you need to specify RTLD_GLOBAL (instead of RTLD_LOCAL), so the symbols will be made visible to any subsequently loaded libs, such as Data/Dumper/Dumper.so.

Here's how I got it to work on my Linux box (with Perl installed under /usr/local/perl/5.10.0):

# compile/link shared lib which includes Perl interpreter:

gcc -Wall -pedantic -fPIC -shared \
    -o perl_test1.so  perl_test1.c \
    `/usr/local/perl/5.10.0/bin/perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts -e ld
+opts`

# compile/link the test program that loads it using dlopen:

gcc -Wall -pedantic -Wl,-rpath=. \
    -o perl_test2  perl_test2.c \
    -ldl

# ...and run it:

$ ./perl_test2
$VAR1 = 'this is a string';
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