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.

[1] https://github.com/SublimeLinter

You appear to be correct- my remark was based on what I guess is out of date experience.

> 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)

> I refuse to add non-python dependencies to any plugins I write

Is there a Package Control channel that ONLY lists packages following that noble rule? I'd be a lot more willing to try things out from that.