Most likely - when the Nim's manual was created GCC's ld.bfd that everyone used 
was built as such that `--as-needed` flag wasn't a default option. Since then 
most of the Linux distributions do package ld.bfd with `--as-needed` flag on by 
default. For dynamic libraries it doesn't discard them during linking phase if 
at the point of symbol resolution they don't provide any needed symbols.

Reply via email to