Linux programs are notorious for containing a lot of symbol information and the toolchain doesn't exactly make it easy to get rid of them. To start with, you ha

Linux programs are notorious for containing a lot of symbol information and the toolchain doesn't exactly make it easy to get rid of them. To start with, you have to compile executables with '-fdefault-visibility=hidden'. Otherwise, strip cannot remove the symbols defined in the executable because it's assumed that another executable might want to load your executable as a shared object and import its functions/global variables. Next, if you are using any kind of library, even statically linked, changing the default visibility for your executable isn't enough to get rid of the libraries' symbols, because those were already defaulted to public when the respective library was compiled. Also when statically linking, you probably want to compile all the libraries with '-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections' and pass '--gc-sections' to the linker to prevent bloating your executable with unused functionality.