[rnhmjoj]

GHC is notoriously large. The compiler itself is around 1.5GB (this includes documentation, static and dynamic libraries).

To get an idea of the size of the bare-minimum system that's required to develop in language x, you can look at the cumulative sizes of the Nix package closures. This is what I get for ghc, nodejs and python3:

    λ nix path-info -rS nixpkgs.ghc | awk '{s+=$2}END{print s/1073741824 " GB"}'
    3.35463 GB

    λ nix path-info -rS nixpkgs.nodejs | awk '{s+=$2}END{print s/1073741824 " GB"}'
    1.05813 GB

    λ nix path-info -rS nixpkgs.python3 | awk '{s+=$2}END{print s/1073741824 " GB"}'
    0.485017 GB