RAM is quite cheap now. It is quite difficult to find anybody running a system with less than 64M of RAM. CPUs are fast. It is 21st century, after all. Is Pike's target market 486dx33 with 8MB RAM? I doubt that.
I would argue that why can't Pike's target market be 486dx33's? I personally have tried to install pike on a 32MB CRAMFS partition on a embedded machine, and it just can't be done. This is a real pity because with things like it's easy to use HTTP stack and good networking it is an excellent choice for embedded applications.
I think real effort should go into making pike smaller, as well as making it bigger.
[jnt@rusty]~$ du -sh /sw/lib/pike/ 18M /sw/lib/pike
See what I mean?
--- James Tyson Director, Giant Robot Ltd http://www.giantrobot.co.nz/