Light foot print? Perhaps you mean light relative to the amount of memory they've been sticking on smaller and smaller chunks or real stuff.

There is already a miniperl and a microperl, which I guess would be the Perl equivalents of J2ME (where the "M" is micro: don't be deceived, it's not just regular Java on a phone). Each is a stripped down version and misses various libraries. It's only the distribution size of perl that's huge. Compile that puppy, strip out the modules you don't want, and perhaps compress some things and you have a decently sized distro.