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Comment by espoal | Hacker News Reader

Why the compiler can't detect it will not be used? Tree shaking is well implemented in Javascript compilers, an ecosystem which extensively suffer from this problem. It should be possible to build a dependency graph and analyze which functions might actually end up in the scope. After all the same is already done for closures.

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A more realistic example: something like printf or scanf. It can take an object of multiple types as argument. It takes computer's locale from environment and does locale dependent number and date formatting, also supports various timezones that it reads from OS.

And you always run it in a data center that uses a specific locale, and only UTC time zone, and very few simple types. But all this can only be known at runtime, except maybe types if the compiler is good.

As poster dead deep in the thread below, something like this can happen

doc_format = get_user_input() parsed_doc = foolib.parse(doc_format)

You as the implementer might know the user will never input xml, so doc_format can't be 'xml' (you might even add some error handling if the user inputs this), but how can you communicate this to the compiler?

That's called bad library design. Rather than a global, make an instantiated parser that takes in specific codecs.

It aint matter, if format is comes from runtime then compiler will not know.

What you're calling "tree shaking" is more commonly called "dead code elimination" in compilers, and is one of the basic optimisations that any production compiler would implement.

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