[jwmerrill]

Here’s a conversation about tree shaking in Lisp from 1994 [1] (from the posted Wikipedia page).

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk

[lispm]

One of the earliest "tree shaker" might be the "selective linker" of MacScheme (an early Scheme implementation for the Apple Macintosh), which was developed in 1985 by William Clinger. It's for example mentioned in the 1987 release announcement for MacScheme+Toolsmith Version 1.0:

https://ml.cddddr.org/scheme/msg00189.html

Lucid Common Lisp had a tree shaker as part of their delivery tool. That one was developed from 1988 onwards.