I have a lowendbox for personal PHP projects. I'd love something with a little more static typing, but there's really no alternative (maybe Perl in strict mode?

I have a lowendbox for personal PHP projects. I'd love something with a little more static typing, but there's really no alternative (maybe Perl in strict mode?) that isn't going to blow out my 128M ram (no chance of Tomcat). Perhaps C++, but i'd need to first sort out a good templating system, and FastCGI wrapper / spawner.