Try it. If you do not use any "optional" dependency it becomes pretty limited, almost useless for anything serious (eg. zlib, ssl)

Zlib is pretty small.

TLS implementions are often giant hairballs but one that many things depend on. You can think of it as a somewhat "system level" dependency.

Being small is not in the question. Being there is. Otherwise we wouldn't be here discussing all hyper dependencies in detail as some of these are a lot smaller than zlib.

I am late to reply. What I mean to say is zlib is a small self contained dependency, suitable for static linking, and no major dependency of its own, just math. A lot of more modern libraries and languages tend to have their small dependencies pull in a massive hydra of dependencies.