> Calling it "tree shaking" is web development term AFAIK.
I think that's backwards. Lars Bak and the other V8 folks came from the Smalltalk world and brought the "tree shaking" term with them as far as I know.
In any case, before the JavaScript usage, it seems that treeshaking applied to objects to be included in a runtime image. The JavaScript usage is actually more akin to the dead-code elimination and link-time symbol removal of compiled and linked languages.
I think that's backwards. Lars Bak and the other V8 folks came from the Smalltalk world and brought the "tree shaking" term with them as far as I know.