I'm no XS or Inline::C guru. Take the following comments with a grain (or more) of salt.

I've used Inline::C a few times and it is pretty slick for quickly hacking together a bit of C code and Perl. Couldn't be any easier.

I understand that I::C autogenerates XS code behind the scenes. I have seen multiple recommendations here that a good way to get up and running with XS is to use I::C to generate a basic chunk of XS and then switch to pure XS for production use.

I've never needed to take this final step with my I::C hackery, but based on other reports it's worth investigating.

Some other tools are mentioned in this thread.