Christian Ruppert (idl0r) asked me today whether --as-needed makes software faster or smaller. I guess this is one of the most confusing points about --as-needed; focus of tons of hearsay, and with different assertions all around the place. So I’ll do my best to explain this once and for all.
In perfect conditions, that is, if --as-needed were not doing anything at all, then it wouldn’t be changing anything. The flag is not magical, it does not optimise the output at all. The same exact result you would have if libtool wasn’t pushing all crap down the line, and if all the build systems only requested the correct dependencies.
When it does matter is when overlink is present. To understand what the term overlink refers to check my old post that explains a bit what --as-needed does, and shows the overlink case, the perfect link case, and what really happens.
Now, of course you’ll find reports of users saying that --as-needed makes software faster or smaller. Is this true, or false? It’s not easy to answer one straight answer because it depends on what it’s happening with and without the flag. If with the flag there are libraries loaded, directly and indirectly, that are not used (neither directly nor indirectly), then the process spawned from the executable will have less libraries loaded in the address space, and thus both be faster to load (no need to read, map in memory, and relocate those libraries) and smaller in memory (some libraries are “free” in memory, but most will have relocations, especially if immediate bindings (“now” bindings) are used, like happens for setuid executables.
Indeed, the biggest improvements you can have when comparing the with and without cases in a system, or in software, that uses immediate bindings. In that case, all the symbols from shared objects are bound at load, instead than at runtime, so the startup time for the processes are cut down sensibly. This does not only involve hardened systems, or setuid binaries, but also applications using plugins, that may be requesting immediate bindings (to reject the plugin, rather than aborting at runtime, in case of missing symbols).