Changed a little your code to print out the keys as well as the values. De-referencing the hash is now ok, see code below. Thanks to you and ikegami for being so responsive, it helped me on my way. PS: indeed BUILD NOISY option is very informative.

use Inline C => Config =>
    BUILD_NOISY => 1;

use Inline C;
      
    $arref = get_data();
    
    print $arref, "\n";

    $href = $arref->[0];

    foreach my $key (sort keys %$href) {
    
       # print "v1 Key: ", $key, " => Value: ", $arref->[0]->{$key}, "
+\n";
       print "v2 Key: ", $key, " => Value: ", $href->{$key}, "\n";

    }


__END__
__C__

 SV* get_data() {
    AV * results;
    HV * rh = newHV();

    results = newAV();

    hv_store(rh, "mickey", 6, newSVpv("mouse", 0), 0);
    hv_store(rh, "donkey", 6, newSVpv("kong", 0), 0);
 
    av_push(results,newRV_noinc((SV*)rh));

    return newRV_noinc((SV*)results);

}
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