"The thing is that maximal tree-shaking for languages with a thicker run-time has not been a huge priority. Consider Go: according to the #golang wiki, the most trivial program compiled to #WebAssembly from Go is 2 megabytes, and adding imports can make this go to 10 megabytes or more. Or look at Pyodide, the Python WebAssembly port: the REPL example downloads about 20 megabytes of data. These are fine sizes for technology demos or, in the limit, very rich applications, but they aren't winners for web development.
[...]
I work on the #Hoot#Scheme compiler, which targets #Wasm with GC. We manage to get down to 70 kB or so right now, in the minimal "main" compilation unit, and are aiming for lower; auxiliary compilation units that import run-time facilities (the current exception handler and so on) from the main module can be sub-kilobyte. Getting here has been tricky though, and I think it would be even trickier for #Python."
