In the last episode (Jul 23), Martin Nilsson (DivX Inc.) @ Pike (-) developers forum said:

Something strange has happened with the pike 7.7 binary during the last month or so. It used to be 4.6 MB, but is now 15.4 MB when looking with ls. Using size however tells that the text segment is down 34k and the rest remains unchanged since May. What's the padding?

My pike binary is 1.6MB. Are yours unstripped sizes? You can use "nm --size-sort -S" to print and sort by size of all the symbols in the binary. Maybe the newer pike is linking to a static library for some reason?