Lambda the Ultimate

Most embedded systems development is done in C. It's rare to see a functional programming language target any kind of microcontroller, let alone an 8-bit microcontroller with only a few kB of RAM. But the team behind the OcaPic project has somehow managed to get OCaml running on a PIC18 microcontroller. To do so, they created an efficient OCaml virtual machine in PIC assembler (~4kB of program memory), and utilized some clever techniques to postprocess the compiled bytecode to reduce heap usage, eliminate unused closures, reduce indirections, and compress the bytecode representation. Even if you're not interested in embedded systems, you may find some interesting ideas there for reducing overheads or dealing with constrained resource budgets.