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.
The "compatible but implicitly relies on upstream infrastructure" tension plays out identically in Python packaging right now with uv. uv is 10-100x faster than pip, written in Rust, and speaks the same interface — pyproject.toml, requirements.txt, pip install semantics — but it's not pip. It calls PyPI's APIs directly rather than running any Python tooling. Same question: is that "pip compatible" or "a faster frontend to PyPI's infrastructure that pip happens to also use"?
The Homebrew maintainer's point is valid but cuts both ways. If the underlying infrastructure (PyPI's simple API, Homebrew's bottle CDN) is stable and public, building faster frontends is valuable even if they have partial compatibility. The risk is fragility when the host infrastructure changes in ways the frontend doesn't anticipate — and that's a real risk worth naming clearly in the README rather than claiming full compatibility.
uv has been pretty careful about this framing. The Nanobrew README calling itself "compatible with brew" is doing more work than it should.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks.
People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
I didn't know about the pending, official Rust frontend! That's very interesting.
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.
(Just kidding, thank you for creating homebrew and your continued work on it!)
> 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.
Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks.
1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers
There's also https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher for the adventurous.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything
The Homebrew maintainer's point is valid but cuts both ways. If the underlying infrastructure (PyPI's simple API, Homebrew's bottle CDN) is stable and public, building faster frontends is valuable even if they have partial compatibility. The risk is fragility when the host infrastructure changes in ways the frontend doesn't anticipate — and that's a real risk worth naming clearly in the README rather than claiming full compatibility.
uv has been pretty careful about this framing. The Nanobrew README calling itself "compatible with brew" is doing more work than it should.
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 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).
Edit: no, it won't...
https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-2365...
Do they use some kind of Ruby parser to parse formulae?
[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/26-tahoe/Form...
[0] https://github.com/lucasgelfond/zerobrew
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.
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.
nb info --cask codex-app
nb: formula '--cask' not found
nb: formula 'codex-app' not found
Since the first 3 has no dependency on D, a better way would be to install them in parallel while D is still downloading.