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petcatyesterday at 4:13 PM4 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

kelvieyesterday at 6:05 PM

One of the reasons I switched to arch from debian based distros was precisely how much faster pacman was compared to APT -- system updates shouldn't take over half an hour when I have a (multi)gigabit connection and an SSD.

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)

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novokyesterday at 5:44 PM

Ruby doesn't have to be the slow part, bazel uses starlark which is mostly python and it's very fast.

akdev1lyesterday at 6:34 PM

yum was slow not because of python but because of the algorithm used to solve dependencies

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)

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mhurronyesterday at 6:46 PM

> Yeah I don't know why people are saying that speed doesn't matter. I use Homebrew and it is slow

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?