[fbkr]

> There are linker flags that allow some deduplication but those have their own drawbacks

As long as you use --icf=safe I don't see any drawback, and most of the time it results in almost identical reductions to --icf=all since not many real programs compare addresses of functions.

[josefx]

I think that requires separate function sections, which themselves may cause bloat and data duplication.

[fbkr]

I, along with everyone in the embedded space, have been using separate function sections forever for --gc-sections and I would be very surprised if they really cause any bloat and duplication at runtime. Do you mean bloat for intermediate files?

[josefx]

It may be limited to intermediate files, I assumed that the downside would be bigger since it is not a default and the description mentioned that some things may not be merged as well.