"For both Node and Ruby you need a C compiler on the system which is hundreds of megabytes alone."
Wait what? What c compiler is hundreds of megabytes?
$ ls -sh /usr/bin/gcc-5
896K /usr/bin/gcc-5
$ ldd /usr/bin/gcc-5
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007ffc64bf5000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fda3da4f000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x000055f2460a1000)
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.
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.
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)).