I have a C++ library that generates much larger code that I would really expect for what it is doing. From less than 50K lines of source I get shared objects that are almost 4 MB and static archives pushing 9. This is problematic both because the library binaries are quite large, and, much worse, even simple applications linking against it typically gain 500 to 1000 KB in code size. Compiling the library with flags like -Os helps this somewhat, but not really very much.
I have also experimented with GCC's -frepo command (even though all the documentation I've seen suggests that on Linux collect2 will merge duplicate templates anyway) and explicit template instantiation on templates that seemed "likely" to be duplicated a lot, but with no real effect in either case. Of course I say "likely" because, as with any kind of profiling, blind guessing like this is almost always wrong.
Is there some tool that makes it easy to profile code size, or some other way I can figure out what is taking up so much room, or, more generally, any other things I should try? Something that works under Linux would be ideal but I'll take what I can get.
If you want to find out what is being put into your executable, then ask your tools. Turn on the ld linker's --print-map (or -M) option to produce a map file showing what it has put in memory and where. Doing this for the static linked example is probably more informative.
If you're not invoking ld directly, but only via the gcc command line, you can pass ld specific options to ld from the gcc command line by preceding them with -Wl,.