[autarch]

I was writing a comment asking if it was really easier. Then I took a look at Cython. Yes, this looks easier than Perl's XS, which I have some experience with! There are ways to do something similar in Perl these days, notably https://metacpan.org/pod/FFI::Platypus. But these are relatively new (starting in the 2010s) compared to the history of Perl, and Cython goes back to the early 2000s.

[cestith]

Somewhere in the continuum from SWIG through XS and on to Platypus there are also the Inline modules these days. They allow one to put inline sections of other languages into Perl code the way many language tools used to allow one to inline assembly into C or Pascal code.

There are some of these modules for other languages than those listed here, a lot of them as high level as Perl (including Raku and even another Perl system for some reason).

https://metacpan.org/dist/Inline-C/view/lib/Inline/C.pod

https://metacpan.org/dist/Inline-ASM/view/ASM.pod

https://metacpan.org/dist/Inline-CPP/view/lib/Inline/CPP.pod

https://metacpan.org/dist/Inline-CPR/view/CPR.pod

https://metacpan.org/pod/Inline::Lua

https://metacpan.org/dist/Inline-Java/view/lib/Inline/Java.p...

https://metacpan.org/pod/Inline::Guile

https://metacpan.org/dist/Inline-SLang/view/SLang.pod

There are even tools to convert from Inline to XS for C and C++.

https://metacpan.org/dist/InlineX-CPP2XS/view/CPP2XS-Cookboo...

https://metacpan.org/pod/InlineX::XS

[autarch]

True. For whatever reason, these never displaced XS. For wrapping C libraries in particular, it's not clear to me how much Inline::C helps with this. You're still stuck using a lot of Perl C API calls, AFAICT, which I think is the biggest challenge of using XS (I still have nightmares from trying to figure out where and when to add `sv2mortal` in my XS code).