The article dives into the challenges of reducing the size of static libraries, particularly in the context of a Rust library intended for Go developers. The author encountered a significant issue when the Rust library compiled into a static library reached 132MB, which exceeded GitHub's 50MB limit. Given that Go developers prefer static linking for ease of deployment, the author sought methods to shrink the library size while maintaining its usability. The process began with unpacking the static library and linking all object files together using the ld linker with the `--gc-sections` flag to remove unused code. This initial effort reduced the library size to 107MB. Further optimizations included removing LLVM bitcode and debug information, which led to more substantial size reductions. By merging small sections into larger ones, the final size dropped to 19MB, a reduction of over 85% from the original size. Despite these improvements, the author acknowledged potential trade-offs. Stripping debug information might complicate backtraces, and merging sections could hinder future linking optimizations. Compatibility issues also arose when trying to port the library to macOS, where the linker did not support the necessary flags for size reduction. The article highlights practical techniques for library optimization while emphasizing the balance between size and usability.