I'm curious if anyone has made attempts to "cache" the bootstrap process in Drupal.

Normally, Drupal will run the 7 bootstrap phases on each request, but perhaps on a deployed production system, one could "do away" with some or all of these?

Possible suggestions I have in mind could be

1. Serializing the bootstrapped state and sticking it into memcache
1. A script could generate a patch for bootstrap.inc that will hardcode certain information into the file.
1. I believe [chx][1] has tried to keep a bootstrapped Drupal running on libevent.
1. Other craziness?

What attempts are there, and which are known to be (somewhat) reliable?

   [1]: http://drupal.org/user/9446