What am I missing?

Nothing it seems.

I had two attempts at converting that C to Perl -- actually a couple of weeks back for one of my 6 attempts at Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words -- and they both failed to produce the correct results. I assumed at the time that it was because Perl doesn't allow me to type the numbers as unsigned and thus perl was transitioning the bit patterns through some signed/unsigned conversions somewhere and that was the cause of the failure. I didn't investigate further.

Seems I was wrong and must have coded something incorrectly -- perhaps I didn't include enough parens and fell foul of a precedence error or some such. I didn't keep the code so I don't know for sure.

Anywho, your conversion works perfectly and still allows this to process 26 chars with 6 wildcards (nearly 1 million iterations) in ~20 seconds and 1.6 MB of ram:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
sub _next {
    my ($v) =  @_;
    my  $t  = ($v | ($v - 1)) + 1;
    return ($t | (((($t & -$t) / ($v & -$v)) >> 1) - 1));
}

sub permIt {
    my $l = @_;
    my @chars = grep $_ ne '-', @_;
    my $n = my $s = ( 1 << @chars ) -1;
    return sub {
        return undef if $n > ( $s << ( $l - @chars ) );
        my $bits = pack 'Q', $n;
        my @copy = @chars;
        my $str = join '', map{
            vec( $bits, $_, 1 ) ? shift( @copy ) : '-'
        } 0 .. $l-1;
        $n = _next( $n );
        return $str;
    };
}

my $iter = permIt( split '', $ARGV[0] );
#print $_  while defined( $_ = $iter->() );
#__END__
my $n = 0;
printf "\r%d\t", ++$n while defined( $_ = $iter->() );
print $n;

__END__
C:\test>1059792 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ------
906192  906192


  | 1| 2|  3|   4|   5|   6|    7|    8|    9|
 -+--+--+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+
 1| 2| 3|  4|   5|   6|   7|    8|    9|   10|
 2| 3| 6| 10|  15|  21|  28|   36|   45|   55|
 3| 4|10| 20|  35|  56|  84|  120|  165|  220|
 4| 5|15| 35|  70| 126| 210|  330|  495|  715|
 5| 6|21| 56| 126| 252| 462|  792| 1281| 2002|
 6| 7|28| 84| 210| 462| 929| 1716| 3003| 5005|
 7| 8|36|120| 330| 792|1716| 3432| 6435|11440|
 8| 9|45|165| 495|1287|3003| 6435|12870|24310|
 9|10|55|220| 715|2002|5005|11440|24310|48620|
10|11|66|286|1001|3003|8008|19448|43758|92378|
[download]

If you're really bored, you might try to resolve the table at the end -- characters down; wildcards across -- to a formula.

It looks related to Fibonacci; but its eluding my grey matter at the moment.