All the ones I use (cppcheck, jshint, jsxhint, ruby, clang) require that you have the toolchains already installed. Seems like a pretty consistent design. Those are the official linters [1], though.
Edit: Checked a bunch of the others, including those for Lua, XML and Python. None of them come bundled with the underlying tool.
> seems to drag a full install of whatever the popular implementation of the language is.
This is the biggest problem with sublime plugins. dependencies. It is also 100% why I refuse to add non-python dependencies to any plugins I write (which has really just been JsFormat thus far)
Edit: Checked a bunch of the others, including those for Lua, XML and Python. None of them come bundled with the underlying tool.
[1] https://github.com/SublimeLinter