TeX distributions are enormous, but the binaries themselves are actually not big—the overhead imposed by Knuth’s obnoxious license, while nonzero (you can’t modify the original Pascal-in-WEB source, only patch it, so a manual source port to a different language is painful enough that nobody tried, we’re all using an automatic Pascal-to-C translation with lipstick on it), is not huge, and aside from a smattering of utilities that’s it for the binary part.

It’s just that the distros also include oodles of (plain text!) macro packages for everything under the sun. There are some legitimately large things such as fonts, but generally speaking a full TeXLive or MiKTeX distribution is bloat by ten thousand 100-kilobyte files, like a Python distribution with the whole of PyPI included.

If you know what you want, you can probably fit a comprehensive LaTeX workbench in under 50M, but it takes an inordinate amount of time.

I agree with your main point about the binaries being small and a reasonable LaTeX distribution fitting in under 50 MiB (I think starting with a minimal MiKTeX and letting it install what you need a few times will leave you there as well), but regarding

> a manual source port to a different language is painful enough that nobody tried

there are in fact quite a few, many of which are complete: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/507846/are-there-any...

Pardon me, but why have modern binaries grown so big? When I wrote my thesis in TeX, the entire installation would fit in some 30 megabytes or so. It was actually right in the uncomfortable middle. Far too big to carry around on a set of diskettes, but a CD would be waste of space.

You can fit a decent TeX distribution in <100MB.

But if you want to have every macro package that everyone everywhere likes, you're going to use some space.

I've often wondered why there isn't a dependency system for TeX that lets you get only the packages you need... feed it a document and tell it to automatically download and install any missing packages.

There may be some technical reason why this isn't practical. Anyone know, offhand?

Totally practical and supported. See MikTeX: https://miktex.org/kb/just-enough-tex

But the reason I don't use it is because I don't always have Internet when I need to write my document. I'd rather download all the packages and their documentation beforehand.

When stuck on a plane without wifi the only thing I could find on my computer to read were the Tex manuals. Good stuff.

MikTeX also supports downloading individual packages, though I wish there was an option to download, say, the most commonly used 1GB or something.

There is a TeX distribution that does what you say, TinyTeX. For some reason it is obscure and only really used by R and R Studio users. That may be because it is used to render R Markdown documents to pdf.