Why are you worried about competition? If you are afraid someone is going to steal your ideas, get over it. If it was worth something you would either patent it or not share it. If you've written something you think is comercially viable, then I can see why you are worried but I don't see why you are giving it away.
Oh well, the way to do this is to follow the instructions on embedding a perl interpreter into a c program, and follow that route. I've seen numerous accounts on how to do this, in fact I think there is a link in the Monk Library.
And yes, C is going to need many more lines of code because C does not handle text processing very well. This doesn't make it a bad language. I'm all for knowing several languages.