fanoush, some Smalltalks do give you the facility to produce exe's but IMHO this detracts from one of the major benefits, namely having a live environment that can be customised on the fly.

Squeak consists of a VM containing machine dependent code while all else (the bulk) of code is straight smalltalk in the "image" file. The VM I currently have on my 770 is ~2.5meg but is not customised and still contains plug-in's that could be excluded. The Squeak image file I am using is the one found at Squeak.org/. It is 15meg *but* this can be reduced significantly while still retaining much of the core functionality. For example, the "SqueakLight" image is 5meg, "KernalImage" more/less than 5meg depending on your focus, while others are working on VM's and images in the 100'sk range. There is plenty of scope for tailoring VM/image size to your requirement and even package that do the job for you. Keep in mind you get a lot of bang for your buck in these images, even the smaller one's.

Shared libraries can be accessed via plug-in's compiled either internal/external to the VM or in most cases simply via the Foreign Function Interface (FFI) directly from Smalltalk.

If speed is an issue then Exupery (wip) may eventually offer the ability to selectively compile byte-code to native. It does now, at least for x86. In practice I haven't found Squeak to lacking speed-wise.