Technical Term: Devirtualization

Intelligent Tree Shaking

When we set out to design the Firefly compiler for the Fidelity Framework, one of our core goals was to produce truly minimal native executables. In the world of traditional .NET development, your “Hello World” application carries the weight of the entire runtime and referenced assemblies, resulting in deployments measured in megabytes. For embedded systems, high-frequency trading platforms, or any scenario where every byte matters, this overhead is unacceptable. Our solution involves a revolutionary approach: type-aware tree shaking that operates directly on the F# Compiler Services AST, preserving rich type information to guide precise dead code elimination.