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You might not care to shrink it down for 500KB to 200KB. But shrinking 200MiB binary to 40MiB is nice.

But shrinking 200MiB binary to 40MiB is nice.

Is that the average size savings?

You can make that kind of saving quite easily if you are statically linking a load of stuff together. Often the extra libs have a whole set of features you don't need and didn't realise were so large.

Should the linker not throw away dead code?

It depends on the linker and the command line options to the compiler and the linker. I was surprised to find out that, e.g., GCC, has this off by default and you have to pass options to enable it.

Normally, if you use archive (.a) files, then any .o files within them that are not needed, are thrown away.

But that is at .o file granularity. There's no per-symbol dead code elimination.

And if you provide a list of .o files (no .a files) then it doesn't throw away anything at all.

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