6.3.3.1 About unused subprogram/data elimination

By default, an executable contains all code and data of its composing objects (directly linked or coming from statically linked libraries), even data or code never used by this executable.

This feature will allow you to eliminate such unused code from your executable, making it smaller (in disk and in memory).

This functionality is available on all Linux platforms except for the IA-64 architecture and on all cross platforms using the ELF binary file format. In both cases GNU binutils version 2.16 or later are required to enable it.