[christophilus]

I imagine it would be possible to do some dead code elimination in the future to get the size down. Still, 500KB is roughly the size of a lot of the real world apps[0]. I'd imagine an equivalent app, written in Go would be around double, given this baseline number. Double isn't soo bad, but it would be nice to get this number down.

[0] https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld

[bradfitz]

The Go linker does dead code elimination already.

[candiodari]

Dead code elimination can happen in many places. In Go, for instance, an obvious one would be to eliminate most type info for types which will never be queried for introspection.

No linker will ever do that.