It's several years ago, but I remember Alan Burlison working on a similar project. His goal was to get a minimal perl to be used on a Solaris QuickStart, shooting such a minimal perl early in the net-boot process to the net-booting machine, so that perl would be available later on the boot process. Of course, a full perl would be installed later in the boot process. And I think he actually ripped out unneeded functionality from perl itself, just to get the size down.

You may want to browse the p5p archives.