Shrinking While Linking

> A static library is nothing but a bundle of object files, wrapped in an ancient and never-quite-standardized archive format.

To this day I'm astonished that it's not just tar. Or pax. Or even cpio! Or literally any file format that has any other use.

These are extremely practical tips on using binutils to shrink your libraries. It might also be worthwhile to compile the library without per-function sections in the first place, which hopefully can be done without patching rustc. On many platforms this produces significantly smaller code in GCC.

> Back in the day, your compiler or assembler would turn each source file into an “object” file containing the compiled code.

Lots and lots of code is still C and C++. That's not really "back in the day".