Because it's part of the linking process. The linking process brings together dependencies to produce the final product ( an assembly in the .net world ). The .

Because it's part of the linking process. The linking process brings together dependencies to produce the final product ( an assembly in the .net world ). The .NET IL linker may "link" the bare minimum resources necessary, but it still links the bare minimum resources. Also optimization, pruning, etc can happen in every stage of the building process. Preprocessing, compiling, assembly, linking, etc can have optimization. In .NET optimization and pruning can occur post build. The JIT can optimize, prune, etc. Even the native code can be optimized by the runtime. Even hardware like the CPU can perform optimization on your executable. So optimizer or pruner would be an even more confusing name.