Option to remove all non-referenced members from output assembly

[i00]

It would be great to have an option to remove all items from an assembly that are non-referenced. .. With an option to exclude specified attribute names (allow for multiple) - I guess the obfuscation one should be respected by default IF no command line switch is passed in ... and another option to remove private & friend only (to allow for public libs)

Thanks

[AlanHauge-Interacoustics]

I vote for this!

There should be a way to exclude specific classes / methods, also to ensure InternalVisibleTo does not break (for example for unit tests). I'm not I'm a fan of attributing with ObfuscationAttribute, although it's a very simply solution (and I like those !). An exclusion based on (part of) the full name in configuration would be better in my mind.

[lextm]

This is a reasonable but unrealistic feature request for a small open source project of this size.

Tree shaking algorithm isn't simple, and even Microsoft works on this for years and takes several .NET Core releases to improve it.

[deniszykov]

You can use Microsoft remake of monolinker (which is used in Unity and Blazor) for it.

[KirillOsenkov]

Agreed, you can use ILLink on the merged assembly after the fact to tree-shake it.

We do have a branch with a prototype of a linker here: https://github.com/gluck/il-repack/tree/linker

However it's 8 years old, and stale and I don't know what the state of it was.

[KirillOsenkov]

https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/samples/linker-instructions.md