alt Hacker NewsPytorch has 9 transitive dependencies for cpu-only execution, or 29 to bring in cuda.
candle, the most popular rust ml library I found in a cursory search, has 119 for cpu only, and 150 to bring in CUDA.
I guess it's taste whether that's comparable
this would have been a way more satisfying dunk if nvidia hadn't split the cuda functionality needed by pytorch into 19 (!) packages on pypi but such is life.
I expected somebody to pull out an example "disproving" my point. It wouldn't be hard. I can point out rust projects that have a ton of external dependencies, and then point at similar projects with very few.
But a Python example doesn't really count, in my mind -- Python is pre-GitHub so tends to have small numbers of large external dependencies, like C++ and other older languages.