I expect it to drop to 300ms once it no longer relies on Mold for linking. Zig's experimental linker can just modify the binary in place.

Thank you! Yes it will be a lot of work. But it will only get easier.

Over a decade. I should've clarified, I meant "trivially dead" code that's not called by anything. Can you think of another project with that much?

I don't contribute to open source projects often but deleting dead code has never been a big priority in any project I've worked on unless it's creating real technical debt or it's something easy clean up as part of a bigger migration (similar to what you did here). The point is you had time to look at that stuff and take the risk of deleting it while big projects have a hundred other priorities on Github Issues and customer complaints.

It was trivially dead