If you use the reflection package in Go, the dead code elimination optimization step does not run if you use reflect.Method to look up a method because you can use reflect to reach those methods and the linker preserves the possibility.

Unfortunately, almost every large client library has public methods AND references someone who calls the reflection method somewhere, so in many cases you get the full tree of dependencies.

It’s unfortunate because any one dependency can bring in reflect and trigger the behavior. It hurts large generated method libraries the most since you usually only use a small subset.

See https://go.dev/src/cmd/link/internal/ld/deadcode.go line 318