G++ generates code for unused template specializations?

Question

In a bit of serialization code for a project I\'m working on I have a type whose size is compiler dependent. In order to deal with this, I decided to use a template specializati

Answer 1

The template specializations in your example are functions with external linkage. The compiler cannot know that they won't be called from another translation unit.

On my g++ 4.7.2 Ubuntu system, placing the templates into an anonymous namespace and compiling with -O3 prevented the unused function from being generated.

Similarly, declaring the function template static had the desired effect.