There is a reason: the majority of the file size comes from statically linked LLVM libraries. You can instead configure LLVM’s build system to build a single d

There is a reason: the majority of the file size comes from statically linked LLVM libraries. You can instead configure LLVM’s build system to build a single dynamic library and have the tools link to it, and this eliminates all of the duplication. However, it apparently comes with a “substantial performance penalty” [1] due to the nature of dynamic linking. (This actually surprises me, and I wonder whether it’s only referring to the inability to do LTO, or whether even LTO-less static linking is faster. Aside from the startup time issue.) A theoretical alternative would be to build all of the tools into a single executable, à la Busybox, where the combined executable would inspect argv[0] to figure out which tool’s code should be run. That way you could statically link the LLVM libraries without duplicating them in multiple executables. LLVM’s build system does not support this. I think it would be nice if it did, but it would be nontrivial to implement. [1] https://llvm.org/docs/BuildingADistribution.html https://llvm.org/docs/BuildingADistribution.html