The best you can do to get this kind of interaction (at least continuing to pursue this avenue) is via shared memory. IPC::Shareable will permit you to share native Perl variables (basically a shared chunk of memory, using Storable). I believe something like IPC::ShareLite will do precisely what you need, as this is (I believe) a simple interface to the raw memory, so it might be easier to use a binary data structure here so that you can easily pull what you need and use it either in C or Perl.