[FnuGk]

Should the linker not throw away dead code?

[Peaker]

Normally, if you use archive (.a) files, then any .o files within them that are not needed, are thrown away.

But that is at .o file granularity. There's no per-symbol dead code elimination.

And if you provide a list of .o files (no .a files) then it doesn't throw away anything at all.

[phaedrus]

It depends on the linker and the command line options to the compiler and the linker. I was surprised to find out that, e.g., GCC, has this off by default and you have to pass options to enable it.