Tile rendering with a lightweight library

Hi all,

I am looking to setup a local tile server for fun. The guide on switch2osm works however this requires a large disk and a fairly beefy PC to load tiles reasonably quickly.

It seems that there are a number of applications for Android and other mobile OS that can render the entire planet on-the-fly from a custom vector data format. Has anyone investigated taking one of these programs and modifying it to output tiles?

This would surely be a very easy way to run a tile server on the cheap and would do away with the need to be running PostgreSQL+PostGIS

Thanks.