Hacker News

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.

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tree/main/Library/Homebrew/... for reference

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.

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!)

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.

Please, don't remove bottles and casks that are blocked by Gatekeeper. :˜(

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

Run Linux on it. Apple has cut that OS off anyway. Would be safer security wise to have an OS that's updated

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.

You could use the OpenCode legacy patcher to upgrade to v15/Sequoia: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

Brew definitely used to be a lot slower, and I used to find it very tedious. I feel like they've done a reasonably good job in improving that over the years though (with the switch to distributing binaries by default being a huge win in terms of speed). I have to wonder if stuff like this is more due to lingering feelings from before combined with the easy access to vibe coding tools. If LLM coding came a few years earlier, maybe projects like this one would have made more sense to me.

> 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 been a lightweight homebrew user for many, many, many years now. I just use it to download or update a thing I need, once every 3-6mo.

It constantly blows my mind how insanely long it takes just to do a few simple things on the fastest hardware I've ever owned in my life.

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.

If I have to deal with even the mention of another package manager in the cross-platform dev ecosystem I am going to snap

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...

My brew update/upgrade takes forever

I've wanted brew to be faster. It would be a nice QoL for me.

See also: asdf and mise

https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-2365...

> I install most of my packages from a Brewfile, which itself is Ruby code.

Same. Whatever happens, the new version should support Brewfile.

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.

It uses the Homebrew API and uses its own dependency resolver and linker to pull Homebrew's precompiled packages.

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."