Comment by pozorvlak

This is my understanding, yes - http://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage . Some Lisp systems and the Factor language also work like this (though Factor does a lot of work to ensure that the contents of your image matches the code on disk). I believe it's possible to strip down your image for deployment so it only includes code required by your application.

Then again, we live in the era of Docker, in which it's commonplace to ship an entire Linux filesystem along with your web app. So shipping a Smalltalk VM (2.6MB for Pharo 5.0) shouldn't be too much of a stretch.