If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”.
There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks.
Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually have full compatibility. Hopefully this will help share effort across the wider ecosystem.
It is really coll that Homebrew provides a comprehensive enough JSON API to let people build on Homebrew in useful ways without directly running Ruby, despite everything being built in a Ruby DSL. That really does seem like a "best of both worlds" deal, and it's cool that alternative clients can take advantage of that.
I didn't know about the pending, official Rust frontend! That's very interesting.
Yeah I don't know why people are saying that speed doesn't matter. I use Homebrew and it is slow.
It's like yum vs apt in the Linux world. APT (C++) is fast and yum (Python) was slow. Both work fine, but yum would just add a few seconds, or a minute, of little frustrations multiple times a day. It adds up. They finally fixed it with dnf (C++) and now yum is deprecated.
Glad to hear a Rust rewrite is coming to Homebrew soon.
I appreciate the push for an official rust frontend. I've personally been migrating (slowly) to using nix to manage my Mac's software, but there are a ton of limitations which lead me to rely on homebrew anyway. The speed ups will be appreciated.
Sorry, examples of what? Package managers that present themselves as replacements for other package managers? Or package managers that aren't compatible with the registry they're supposed to be compatible with? Your use of scare quotes is confusing.
What would be great is a Homebrew-compatible system that doesn't cut off support for older machines. I have a 3.8 GHz Quad core i5 iMac that still crushes, yet Homebrew has determined that I'm just too old and icky[1] to work with anymore. I had to move over to MacPorts, which is surprisingly nice, but I still miss brew.
Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks.
Yes MacPorts is the way. I switched after a new MacOS release meant mine was too old - brew update uninstalled a bunch of stuff I had been using then it stopped and let me know.
This feels like a solution looking for a problem. I have a couple hundred brew packages on my system and I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update. I’m sure the Homebrew folks could mine this for a few ideas of how to further optimize brew, but I don’t think I’ll be adopting it anytime soon. Compatibility is more important than speed in this case.
But you can turn that behavior off, IIRC it tells you the environment variable to set if you don’t want it to do that every time it runs.
I agree it’s annoying, but I haven’t turned it off because it’s only annoying because I’m not keeping my computer (brew packages) up-to-date normally (aka, it’s my own fault).
FWIW this seems to have improved in recent years. Back in the dark times of non parallelized downloads I would purposefully wait to end of day and fire the thing off before leaving
If you use the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin, running `brew` against the generated brewfile becomes the slowest part of a `darwin-rebuild switch` by far. In the fast cases, it turns something that could take 1 second into something that takes 10, which is definitely annoying when running that command is part of your process for configuration changes even when you don't update anything. Homebrew no-ops against an unchanging Brewfile are really slow.
Agreed here. The speed bottleneck I run into is simply that there's often a lot of packages that need updating, so there's a lot to download. And if anything needs to be compiled from source then the time that takes will dominate (though I think everything I currently run is thankfully pre-built)
The same criticism has been said of Deno and Pnpm and bun, and yet, despite all these years since their respective releases, node and npm remain slower than all three options.
Yeah, but do they work? Last time I gave bun a chance their runtime had serious issues with frequent crashes. Faster package installation or spin-up time is meaningless if it comes at the cost of stability and compatibility.
Agreed on horses for courses. Different people have different tolerances. And yea, all things being equal, faster is better, but they are almost never equal. If you don’t mind me asking, what does “too slow” mean for you in this context? Do you have a particularly complex setup? And what do you use now as an alternative and how has that impacted the update speed?
This might be a good thing for homebrew to adopt for the download/install process, but if it doesn't include a ruby interpreter, I have a hard time seeing how it's going to be compatible with anything but searching and installing bottles. I install most of my packages from a Brewfile, which itself is Ruby code.
what happens if I test this tool by installing some packages and then remove (the tool)? will I still be able to use Homebrew to manage these new packages?
I'm not a Python dev, but I appreciate the motivation uv has inspired across other package managers. I tried another brew replacement called zerobrew last month. It installed packages to a different directory from homebrew, so I didn't actually test drive after seeing that. Regardless, I look forward to the competition pushing mainstream tools to improve their performance.
> Zerobrew is experimental. We recommend running it alongside Homebrew rather than as a replacement, and do not recommend purging homebrew and replacing it with zerobrew unless you are absolutely sure about the implications of doing so.
So I guess its fine to run this alongside Homebrew and they don't conflict.
And zerobrew, like the original Homebrew, is compatible with Linux.
It appears that Nanobrew is not.
I care about the light-weight efficiency of these new native code variants much more when I want to use brew on some little Linux container or VM or CI, than I do for my macOS development machine.
I've been looking for something like this, especially to use only with casks now that Homebrew has removed support for not adding the quarantine bit. Looking forward to giving it a try!
The current version of brew has a flaw where the installer can't install isolated dependency trees in a sterile manner. If you have packages A, B, C, and D that all have updates, and assuming A,B,C depend on each other and come out to a total of say 1MB, and D is 1000MB, brew works in a MapReduce manner where it will attempt to finish downloading everything in parallel (even though the real bottleneck is D) before doing any installation.
Since the first 3 has no dependency on D, a better way would be to install them in parallel while D is still downloading.
If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”.
There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks.
Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually have full compatibility. Hopefully this will help share effort across the wider ecosystem.
Context for those unaware: the commenter, mikemcquaid, is the project lead for Homebrew.
It is really coll that Homebrew provides a comprehensive enough JSON API to let people build on Homebrew in useful ways without directly running Ruby, despite everything being built in a Ruby DSL. That really does seem like a "best of both worlds" deal, and it's cool that alternative clients can take advantage of that.
I didn't know about the pending, official Rust frontend! That's very interesting.
Wow they are finally getting away from Ruby? Awesome. The speed will be a nice boon
Yeah I don't know why people are saying that speed doesn't matter. I use Homebrew and it is slow.
It's like yum vs apt in the Linux world. APT (C++) is fast and yum (Python) was slow. Both work fine, but yum would just add a few seconds, or a minute, of little frustrations multiple times a day. It adds up. They finally fixed it with dnf (C++) and now yum is deprecated.
Glad to hear a Rust rewrite is coming to Homebrew soon.
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tree/main/Library/Homebrew/... for reference
Heyyyy, who are you to tell us what is and isn't compatible with homebrew?
(Just kidding, thank you for creating homebrew and your continued work on it!)
I appreciate the push for an official rust frontend. I've personally been migrating (slowly) to using nix to manage my Mac's software, but there are a ton of limitations which lead me to rely on homebrew anyway. The speed ups will be appreciated.
Makes no sense, the wording suggests it can use Homebrew's backend, not that it's a complete alternative to Homebrew. Nobody is confused about that.
I mean, I'm confused about it. The nanobrew homepage says this:
> nanobrew
> The fastest macOS package manager. Written in Zig.
> 3.5ms warm install time
> 7,000x faster than Homebrew · faster than echo
It presents itself as an alternative to Homebrew.
There are many such examples for npm as well: many "compatible" managers, one registry.
Sorry, examples of what? Package managers that present themselves as replacements for other package managers? Or package managers that aren't compatible with the registry they're supposed to be compatible with? Your use of scare quotes is confusing.
Please, don't remove bottles and casks that are blocked by Gatekeeper. :˜(
What would be great is a Homebrew-compatible system that doesn't cut off support for older machines. I have a 3.8 GHz Quad core i5 iMac that still crushes, yet Homebrew has determined that I'm just too old and icky[1] to work with anymore. I had to move over to MacPorts, which is surprisingly nice, but I still miss brew.
Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks.
1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers
Yes MacPorts is the way. I switched after a new MacOS release meant mine was too old - brew update uninstalled a bunch of stuff I had been using then it stopped and let me know.
There's also https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher for the adventurous.
To be fair, Apple stopped providing security fixes for Mojave ~4+ years ago, and there have been 7 or 8 new os releases since then…
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything
This feels like a solution looking for a problem. I have a couple hundred brew packages on my system and I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update. I’m sure the Homebrew folks could mine this for a few ideas of how to further optimize brew, but I don’t think I’ll be adopting it anytime soon. Compatibility is more important than speed in this case.
> I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update
I definitely have thought something along those lines (mostly when I go to install a small tool, and get hit with 20 minutes of auto-updates first).
Pretty sure I also will not be adopting this particular solution, however
I've never thought "only 2 seconds faster" - I've certainly thought "why is this taking half the time it takes Gentoo to recompile an entire server".
But you can turn that behavior off, IIRC it tells you the environment variable to set if you don’t want it to do that every time it runs.
I agree it’s annoying, but I haven’t turned it off because it’s only annoying because I’m not keeping my computer (brew packages) up-to-date normally (aka, it’s my own fault).
I'd be much happier if it were on a background job, than arbitrarily running when I invoke a command
Terrible default behavior is a great reason to abandon a software package.
FWIW this seems to have improved in recent years. Back in the dark times of non parallelized downloads I would purposefully wait to end of day and fire the thing off before leaving
See also: asdf and mise
https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290
If you use the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin, running `brew` against the generated brewfile becomes the slowest part of a `darwin-rebuild switch` by far. In the fast cases, it turns something that could take 1 second into something that takes 10, which is definitely annoying when running that command is part of your process for configuration changes even when you don't update anything. Homebrew no-ops against an unchanging Brewfile are really slow.
Agreed here. The speed bottleneck I run into is simply that there's often a lot of packages that need updating, so there's a lot to download. And if anything needs to be compiled from source then the time that takes will dominate (though I think everything I currently run is thankfully pre-built)
I've wanted brew to be faster. It would be a nice QoL for me.
If I have to deal with even the mention of another package manager in the cross-platform dev ecosystem I am going to snap
The same criticism has been said of Deno and Pnpm and bun, and yet, despite all these years since their respective releases, node and npm remain slower than all three options.
Yeah, but do they work? Last time I gave bun a chance their runtime had serious issues with frequent crashes. Faster package installation or spin-up time is meaningless if it comes at the cost of stability and compatibility.
Well, pnpm solves the storage issue, which is a more pressing reason to use it. (I don't know about deno/bun)
Horses for courses, but I've stopped using brew 'cuz it's too slow, so this might bring me back!
Edit: no, it won't...
Agreed on horses for courses. Different people have different tolerances. And yea, all things being equal, faster is better, but they are almost never equal. If you don’t mind me asking, what does “too slow” mean for you in this context? Do you have a particularly complex setup? And what do you use now as an alternative and how has that impacted the update speed?
My brew update/upgrade takes forever
This might be a good thing for homebrew to adopt for the download/install process, but if it doesn't include a ruby interpreter, I have a hard time seeing how it's going to be compatible with anything but searching and installing bottles. I install most of my packages from a Brewfile, which itself is Ruby code.
How does this work? AFAIK Homebrew formulae are written in Ruby [0].
Do they use some kind of Ruby parser to parse formulae?
[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/26-tahoe/Form...
It uses the Homebrew API and uses its own dependency resolver and linker to pull Homebrew's precompiled packages.
If we get the Bun-ification of every package manager and language ecosystem that would be an awesome thing. This is a great trend.
what happens if I test this tool by installing some packages and then remove (the tool)? will I still be able to use Homebrew to manage these new packages?
I'm not a Python dev, but I appreciate the motivation uv has inspired across other package managers. I tried another brew replacement called zerobrew last month. It installed packages to a different directory from homebrew, so I didn't actually test drive after seeing that. Regardless, I look forward to the competition pushing mainstream tools to improve their performance.
Does it reinstall postgres for every package install?
HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 will disable this (annoying) behavior. Set it in your bashrc or zshrc.
(report card for an0malous): "Does not play nice with other students."
It's true :')
It might be good to explain how this differs from zerobrew [0], which is trying to accomplish the same thing
[0] https://github.com/lucasgelfond/zerobrew
Zerobrew looks mature, I'll check it out.
Btw, I noted this:
> Zerobrew is experimental. We recommend running it alongside Homebrew rather than as a replacement, and do not recommend purging homebrew and replacing it with zerobrew unless you are absolutely sure about the implications of doing so.
So I guess its fine to run this alongside Homebrew and they don't conflict.
And zerobrew, like the original Homebrew, is compatible with Linux.
It appears that Nanobrew is not.
I care about the light-weight efficiency of these new native code variants much more when I want to use brew on some little Linux container or VM or CI, than I do for my macOS development machine.
Do you choose compatibility or speed?
nb info --cask codex-app
nb: formula '--cask' not found
nb: formula 'codex-app' not found
I've been looking for something like this, especially to use only with casks now that Homebrew has removed support for not adding the quarantine bit. Looking forward to giving it a try!
And why does speed matter in this case?
The current version of brew has a flaw where the installer can't install isolated dependency trees in a sterile manner. If you have packages A, B, C, and D that all have updates, and assuming A,B,C depend on each other and come out to a total of say 1MB, and D is 1000MB, brew works in a MapReduce manner where it will attempt to finish downloading everything in parallel (even though the real bottleneck is D) before doing any installation.
Since the first 3 has no dependency on D, a better way would be to install them in parallel while D is still downloading.