[kazinator]

> Yet, what if the logger’s ctor function is implemented in a different object file? Well, tough luck. No one requested this file, and the linker will never know it needs to link it to our static program. The result? crash at runtime.

If you have spontaneously called initialization functions as part of an initialization system, then you need to ensure that the symbols are referenced somehow. For instance, a linker script which puts them into a table that is in its own section. Some start-up code walks through the table and calls the functions.

This problem has been solved; take a look at how U-boot and similar projects do it.

This is not an archive problem because the linker will remove unused .o files even if you give it nothing but a list of .o files on the command line, no archives at all.