Re: Trivial program size inflation

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> With most real world programs (hopefully) nearly 100% of what you see
> as overhead now is actually needed - and it still may be bigger than
> what we hope for due to suboptimal modularization.

True.  But this is not always as fixable as that wording implies.

For example, a program that calls printf but never uses any
floating-point values at all will not, in theory, need floating point
support.  But we do not have any mechanism by which anything can
discover that no floating-point printf formats are used and thus bring
in a printf variant that doesn't actually support floating point; this
means that a bunch of floating-point stuff will be brought in even
though it will never actually get used.

I'm not sure how fixable this is.  (I'm also not sure whether it's
worth fixing, but for the purposes of this discussion I'm inclined to
say that doesn't matter.)

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