I really think that modules written in pike can be always included, as they don't really use any space on disk or resources at compilation time at all. Nor does they slow anything done while running pike.
And pike is not _really_ bloated, unless you refer to the installed size, and that is mainly due to the default -g compile of pike.
Compare it to the other scripting languages. And where is the disk-space crisis anyway?
python: /usr/lib/python2.3: 102Mb Executable: 1M (including libpython.so)
perl: /usr/lib/perl5: 45M Executable: 1.5M (including libperl.so)
pike: /usr/local/pike/7.6.6/lib: 18M (stripped -g from .so-files) Executable: 1.7M (-g gone)
We need to work on configure times, though. The largest gain (about 400% or so) can be had by generating configure from an old version of autoconf.