NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

Got a fun little gizmo from Texas Instruments, a Chronos Watch[thanks to 
http://tideals.com/]...  and that has gotten me thinking about playing 
with circuits again.

The problem is, I HATE the idea of learning a bunch of new coding for 
what in the end is a hobby for fun.

Add to that the upcoming release of the Raspberry 
Pi[http://www.raspberrypi.org/] and the 
BeagleBone[http://beagleboard.org/bone] and it's possible to work at a 
relatively high level[both will run linux] on a small system 
board[around the size of a business card] with between 128MB and 512MB 
of memory.

So, for hacking around, it would be nice to have a low impact PHP 
environment with just the basics.  IE strip out most of the functions 
and extensions to PHP, strip out the easter eggs, etc and get it as 
small as possible.

Looking around, I find a few stabs at this, generally from the angle of 
being subtractive - ie patch the code to remove the logo's, run 
configure with disable-* for everything, etc.

Instead, I'm thinking of trying to do it from the other end - ie clone 
the source and then remove every directory and file not needed to 
compile, as well as removing more from the configuration script and 
makefile - with the first goal of being to have a CLI PHP compiled which 
just has a few functions[ideally, break it down to just some basic 
variable manipulation and the echo function], then add functions back in 
on a case by case basis as they are needed.

Just curious if anyone here knows of an approach that starts at the 
minimal end and builds up, or even a subtractive approach that has 
resulted in a very small, limited functionality PHP interpreter?

-Gary