And why would you need that in production ? (hint: use fpm)
This article seems strange : why do you include xcode in npm ? why use a mac if it's that heavy ? sure an IDE is nice but I wouldn't take that as part of the language. Or also include eclipse + plugins.
I certainly agree that you don't need that for production machines.
However /usr/bin/gcc is just a frontend, and calls a slew of other binaries(such as cpp, collect2, cc1, normally found somewhere in /usr/libexec/gcc/). You also need binutils, and to be useful, likely headers for at least the standard C library.
The gcc + binutils package comes up at around 75MB on my machine.
You're measuring the size of a program that calls GCC, not GCC itself at all. gcc-5 isn't the compiler, it dispatches to cpp/cc1/ld/etc.
cc1 is 20MB over here. gold is 5MB. Dynamic libraries it depends on (gmp & family, isl) weigh about 4MB. All-in-all the programs required to compile even a simple C program come out around ~32MB.
Clang is much bigger. Clang 3.8 is 59MB (I think that includes the preprocessor though, but GNU's CPP is only around 1MB (which still seems huge for a preprocessor)).
And why would you need that in production ? (hint: use fpm)
This article seems strange : why do you include xcode in npm ? why use a mac if it's that heavy ? sure an IDE is nice but I wouldn't take that as part of the language. Or also include eclipse + plugins.