[haberman]

> Linking native code doesn't really care about optimizing the size of the output and is just just trying to make sure all code paths can be called with some kind of code.

That is not true at all. There are many use cases where native code size is very important. Native code toolchains often target platforms with extremely limited ROM/RAM. Even on big machines, RAM is not free and cache even less so.

Native code linkers will GC unused code sections (`-Wl,--gc-sections `), fold identical data to remove duplication (see COMDAT). Native code compilers have optimization modes that specifically optimize for small code size (`-Os` and the like).