I would like to merge arne/slim into 8.0. It reduces text size with -O3 by about 100k. Most changes are probably harmless, however one disables support for decoding programs with old style encoding and adds a configure argument to turn it back on. I assume that part of the decoder is not normally used, is that correct?
I believe no one has used OLD_PIKE_ENCODE_PROGRAM since about 2003-02-24, when mast changed it to not be the default, so I don't think there'll be any problems with removing it.