On CentOS/RHEL (+cPanel) installations, if you get a "checking whether the C compiler works... configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs", you may need to remount the /tmp and /var/tmp with exec permissions first:
$ mount -o remount,exec,suid /tmp
$ mount -o remount,exec,suid /var/tmp
Then:
$ pecl install {package}
And, don't forget to remount them as noexec after.