It does, but it's hardly an egregious amount (my 3.7 install on Win10 has it at 800Kb... though I guess tcl takes up 10MiB =P). For reference, the built in venv module (which I never use cause I'm all about that virtualenv life) is 1MB. The python tests are 20MB, and that ships by default on every python installation.

Like if you were in a resource constrained situation, you would be customizing your python install anyways (if nothing else, getting rid of the docs, the tests, maybe stripping out all but the compiled code...).

Maybe just use kitdll instead of a full blown Tcl/Tk distro, to provide the dependency, that would shrink the size a lot.

http://kitcreator.rkeene.org/fossil/wiki?name=KitDLL