| Surely the executable itself is only linked with the | functions that are actually used by the program? AFAIUI the GNU linker is not clever enough to remove junk on a per-function basis, only on a per-object basis. This is why we do object-splitting -- by breaking libraries up into thousands of .o files before rolling them into a .a, the effectiveness of what GNU ld can do is enhanced. Perhaps more recent GNU ld's do better on some platforms? I have a vague recollection of some -gc-sections flag. J