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.
It was mostly precipitated by when containers came in and I was honestly shocked at how fast apk installs packages on alpine compared to my Ubuntu boxes (using apt)
For example pacman does not need to validate the system for partial upgrades because those are unsupported on Arch and if the system is borked then it’s yours to fix.
Anyway the python program would call into libsolv which is implemented in C.
dnf5 is much faster but the authors of the program credit the algorithmic changes and not because it is written in C++
dnf < 5 was still performing similarly to yum (and it was also implemented in python)
I'm perhaps not properly understanding your comment. If the algorithmic changes were responsible for the improved speed, why did the Python version of dnf perform similarly to yum?
Because how often are you running it where it's not anything but a opportunity to take a little breather in a day? And I do mean little, the speedups being touted here are seconds.
I have the same response to the obsession with boot times, how often are you booting your machine where it is actually impacting anything? How often are you installing packages?
Do you have the same time revulsion for going to the bathroom? Or getting a glass of water? or basically everything in life that isn't instantaneous?
I think how to marry the Ruby formulas and a Rust frontend is something the Homebrew devs can figure out and I'm interested to see where it goes, but I don't really care whether Ruby "goes away" from Homebrew in the end or not. It's a lovely language, so if they can keep it for their DSL but improve client performance I think that's great.
(Just kidding, thank you for creating homebrew and your continued work on it!)
You cannot really be compatible with this unless you run the Ruby as the install scripts could do whatever arbitrary computations
In reality most recipes contain a simple declarative config but nothing stops you from doing Ruby in there.
Hence to achieve total compatibility one would need to run Ruby
That said, it's also been a while since I've really had any huge complaints about brew's speed. I use Linux on my personal machines, and the difference in experience with my preferred Linux distro's package manager and brew used to be laughable. To their credit, nowadays, brew largely feels "good enough", so I honestly wouldn't even argue for porting from Ruby based on performance needs at this point. I suspect part of the motivation might be around concerns about relying on the runtime to be available. Brew's use of Ruby comes from a time when it was more typical for people to rely on the versions of Python and Ruby that were shipped with MacOS, but nowadays a lot of people are probably more likely to use tooling from brew itself to manage those, and making everything native avoids the need to bootstrap from an existing runtime.
I would agree with you that probably Ruby itself is probably not the bottleneck (except maybe for depsolving cuz that’s cpu bound)
> 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.
You won't be having situation where one uses yarn and someone uses pnpm on the same project tho.
Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything
That makes no sense then. A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. Take the training wheels off it and then it'll be a power user tool.
No doubt there are edge cases like that, but I don't fault a project for not catering to the < 1% of users who would fall into that bucket and would probably be the ones that cause trickier support cases. These would maybe also be the user that could just install it without homebrew then, it's not like homebrew is the only way to install software.
There's also https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher for the adventurous.
Also, the writing is on the wall: Ultimately, Homebrew will be ARM-only, once Apple's legacy support becomes ARM-only. At which point it's game-over for Intel Macs.
Homebrew solves the "availability of software" problem in the Mac ecosystem, but it does not solve the "Need to stay on the new hardware treadmill" problem.
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).
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.
Never had any issues.
Edit: no, it won't...
https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-2365...
After installing, 'nb list' and thus eg. 'nb outdated' will yield the empty list! I have absolutely no use for a competing homebrew installation that is mostly compatible ..
Same. Whatever happens, the new version should support Brewfile.
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
Do they use some kind of Ruby parser to parse formulae?
[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/26-tahoe/Form...
Since the first 3 has no dependency on D, a better way would be to install them in parallel while D is still downloading.