For release binaries - and for analysis of binary bloat using SizeBench - make sure your DLLs and EXEs are built with these flags set. The standard BinSkim rules will catch many of these issues:
/OPT:REF - Causes the linker to only emit referenced symbols. C++/WinRT’s
name_of<> produces a lot of constant string data that is usually not
referenced - except for the set used for activating runtime classes and
responding to your objects’ GetRuntimeClassName.
/OPT:ICF - C++ generates many identical comdats (chunks of code or data) due to template specialization. Use this switch to merge all of those comdats as much as possible.
/GR- - Disable RTTI; C++/WinRT does not need it, but would generate enormous amounts of type information if enabled. Most RTTI systems can be replaced with either “try_as<>” or other COM-like conversion systems.
PGO - All released binaries should be linked with profile-guided optimization; many C++/WinRT helpers that the normal optimizer inlines are re-converted to method calls after PGO analysis, reducing binary size.