On a side note, being a long-time VW & VAST user, I've always felt the Image Stripper & Runtime Packager did a fairly good job at removing crap from the resulting image.
I don't recall ready anything substantial comparing the Pharo way (bootstrapping from a minimal image and adding stuff) to the VW & VAST way (removing unreferenced stuff) but this would definitely be an interesting topic to read about.
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Beno��t St-Jean
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"A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero". (A. Einstein)