I hope you're refering to your local copy of perlxstut - the copies on perlmonks are out of date. But indeed, the files generated with perl 5.8.6 are slightly longer and have more options and comments in them than the docs show, though it's not too spectacular.

I just tried the first example (adding the hello world function to the xs file) and it works fine for me. Here's what my Mytest.xs looks like (no changes required to any other file) update: I mean: just do what the tutorial says, and ignore small differences in the generated files compared to the docs:

#include "EXTERN.h"
#include "perl.h"
#include "XSUB.h"

#include "ppport.h"


MODULE = Mytest         PACKAGE = Mytest

    
void
hello()
     CODE:
     printf("Hello, world!\n");
[download]

and the test script:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use ExtUtils::testlib;

use Mytest;
Mytest::hello();
__OUTPUT__
Hello, world!
[download]

You should probably remember that XS is whitespace sensitive, especially with regards to the function prototypes.

HTH, Joost.