Apparently executable size can shrink by over a third when compiled with
-flto + -fuse-linker-plugin + -fwholeprogram
and other performance neutral optimizations can be used to shrink
executable size further, to 60% of original. (See [1])
Rebuilding executables with ftlo could be another option if LiveCD
space becomes tight again (in addition to existing techniques such as
AdvanceCOMP and jpegrescan). In general flto etc. should also improve
runtime performance, but may or may not in specific cases. It would
however make build times much slower. It also increases the chance of
hitting gcc related bugs.
To put this in perspective, /usr/bin seems to be about 64MB compressed
(130MB uncompressed), so if we could get this improvement on all
executables we'd expect reclaim in the ballpark of 25MB.
[1] http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=6509
--
John C. McCabe-Dansted
