Is dead code not included in production releases? What about code from using macros?

All public functions and macros will be included in the release because you can load new code later or have dynamic code that uses the seemingly unused functions.

Elixir 1.3 will warn for (seemingly) unused functions unless you explicitly ignore them so you will know if you need to remove them.

Thank you for your reply @ericmj so is there no way to not include or remove the beam files/source code from unused functions and modules during compile-time automatically, considering you have no intentions of ever loading new code?

I know it may sound like a weird thing to want to do but it’s for an experiment I’m working on

Consider the following code:

defmodule Commands do
  def say_hello, do: IO.puts "Hello!"
  def say_goodbye, do: IO.puts "Goodbye!"
end

defmodule Runner do
  def run_command do
    module = IO.gets |> List.wrap |> Module.concat
    fun = IO.gets |> String.to_atom
    apply(module, fun, [])
  end
end

In this case it isn’t even possible in principle to determine wether the Command module can be removed or not as its use is completely determined at runtime. Now obviously my example program here is a bit contrived but you get the idea.

Yes thank you @benwilson512. I understand now