That's probably a one-time install of the haskell-platform package.

After you install that, most dependencies are small.

Small, yes, but they just keep coming. As an example, Pandoc has a tree of something like 70 dependencies on Arch? (I can at least tell you that it has 37 direct dependencies)

It does add up.

That's not wrong, but (at least source code size-wise), Haskell libraries are often very small. The compiled version, less so.

Didn't you download gigabytes worth of os in order to run this in the first place?

If it's a minimal Arch Linux install, it could well by under a gigabyte.

Haskell can build self-contained binaries that don't require a 700MB compiler. Look for /-bin$/ packages.

That depends upon such a package already being available -- it doesn't appear that Yi has any.

Yeah, Yi uses Xmonad style configuration. That is, it re-compiles itself when you modify the configuration file.

This approach means that Yi has to depend on the entire Haskell toolchain :(