This sort of rules out binary distributions, or changing settings on a remote machine where you don't have the build dependencies installed. The latter may be irrelevant for a terminal emulator, but not for the general case.
In my experience if one can edit config files on a system, one has room to install a minimal C compiler. And one can distribute things in a binary form even if the config requires compilation. Consider distributing an application as a library or object files when the target machine needs to compile and link only the config file.
