On Thursday, 9 May 2019 at 11:23:27 UTC, Jack Applegame wrote:
> I tried to use `lld` instead of `arm-none-eabi-ld` and got some interesting results.
> `lld` successfully removed unused string constants.
>
> I found that there is special SFH_MERGE flag. The linker should remove unused constants and merge duplicates in sections marked with this flag. But it seems that the GNU linker ignores it.

Ah, nice. [A non-ancient version of] gold may strip them too then (maybe even recent version of bfd), according to this snippet from the gcc bugzilla linked above (from 2015):

> > [...] perhaps ld's --gc-sections or new special option should just remove unused string literals from mergeable sections.
>
> I believe (I've read, but I haven't verified) that Gold already does this.