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by GrumpySloth 795 days ago
Although true, in most cases when people talk about dead code elimination, they refer to eliminating code inside a function, whereas tree-shaking unambiguously refers to inter-procedural dead code elimination.
2 comments

Probably because traditionally, unused 'objects' in static link libraries were ignored in the first place by linkers. But with LTO the term dead-code-elimination makes sense IMHO (since the LTO pass will drop any code and data that ends up being unused).
I've been around the block and I've never seen it referred to in this way. Dead code is dead code.