I'm no authority, but I highly doubt that even the most trimmed down version of perl could "fit and run within just 256k of code space and 16k of RAM". I would stand corrected if it were possible.
Not embedded, but for Raspberry Pi, we've got RPi::WiringPi (tutorial) and WiringPi::API, but that's not microcontroller.
Personally, I sometimes do my microcontroller prototyping on a Linux box with Perl, then port it over to C/C++ when the code does what I want, but the whole point of using a microcontroller is to run extremely efficiently. Adding in a whole extra layer would slow things down at best, and add in an entire new software layer for things to go wrong at worst.
I haven't heard of any ongoing projects like this, so I'm interested to see what other's takes are though...