I wrote a prototype in Perl ~300 lines within a few days. The C implementation is just taking forever and involving too much pure software engineering overhead

I wrote a prototype in Perl ~300 lines within a few days. The C implementation is just taking forever and involving too much pure software engineering overhead that I can't stand. It's driving me away. I can't get motivated. Too boring, too simple. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack (extremely boring task that will take a while without proper tools)... but every time I start looking, I start wondering how I would construct the barn differently, or how the stack of hay came to be, if it could be organized to find the needle more efficiently, or who owns the barn and what they plan on doing with the barn and the needle and the hay... etc... you see?