[WorldMaker]

Isn't that already just the role of tree-shaking optimizers? At that point the problem seems to be languages that don't have good tree-shakers, don't/can't tree-shake library dependencies, or maybe that tree-shaking should happen earlier and more often than it often does?

Observably, it seems like the "granularity pendulum" in the JS ecosystem very directly related to the module system. CommonJS was tough to tree-shake so you had sometimes wild levels of granularity where even individual functions might be their own package in the dependency graph. ESM is a lot easier to tree-shake and you start to see more of the libraries that once published dozens or hundreds of sub-packages start to repackage back to just one top-level package alongside ESM adoption.

[abathur]

Perhaps by coincidence, there's a good post on treeshaking+wasm on the front page this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40023319

[abathur]

I imagine the answer's ~yes from the perspective of something you build and deploy (and I agree it's relevant to the article--but I'll caveat that I read xamuel to be asking the question very broadly).

Relying on a post-build process to avoid deploying unused code and dependencies still exposes you to a subset of problems with most if not all of the dependency graph.

Sufficiently-rich correct-by-definition metadata on the internal and external dependencies of each package might let you prune some branches without requiring the dependency to be present, but in the broad there are a lot of cases where that can't really help?