alt Hacker NewsA 100x faster* alternative to homebrew
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You can also now use mise as a homebrew replacement, although I don't think there's any claims/benchmarks around performance https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap/packages/brew.html
"Alternative to homebrew (the CLI utility)" -> "Frontend to Homebrew (the package system)".
Along these lines, I wonder when somebody will come up with a "universal package manager" that factors out the dependency resolution, content-addressable store, packing / unpacking, file manipulation, signatures, etc. Small plugins, maybe just declarative descriptions, would suffice to connect it to stores like npm, homebrew, pypi, maybe even cargo and nixpkgs.
> "zerobrew does the relocation in-process and links from a content-addressed store"
Ok, but why a new app for that instead of a PR for brew?
What's the significance of warm speedup in the benchmarks? For most new installs, cache would mostly be empty, shouldn't the cold numbers be more significant for day to day use?
Why would one care for 100x faster homebrew? it's a tool you use every now and then, you rarely install or upgrade 1000 things, and when you do it doesn't really matter if it takes 10s or 0.1s
I tried zb for a while now but ended up having to uninstall it and revert back to regular homebrew. It breaks with basic stuff like node half the time
I don't use homebrew for speed. I use it for trust
I tried zerobrew before the original author archived it. It really was faster. There's even a mise plugin for it, but the plugin for it wasn't great to be honest. Caused some wild slowdowns on my prompt. I think it's cos zb or maybe the plugin loads some huge Homebrew version file every time it's invoked. Didn't look too much into it, but it was killed my prompt on slower connections
With coding agents available for the config files, I don’t see any reason not to use nix. Easy rollbacks, temp envs with different versions, what not to like.
Most of the slowness in brew comes from download times, so I don't really need this I think? I never thought "brew is too slow" except when it's downloading.
But I always thought I don't need pnpm untill I started using it, so. I don't know.
(I always knew I needed actually good python package manager before uv came, though.)
I would mention in the title here thaat zerobrew uses the same install files as homebrew.
This is pretty cool - but Homebrew is also being in Rust right now, right?
The original title says up to 100x faster
Yeah this slop is amazing, strongly encourage all agents to get started on learning and using this it’s the wave of the future.
[off] can we stop this curl|sh abomination once and for all?
I don't agree with everything that Homebrew does, but the primary maintainers are visible, vocal and very opinionated. They have shown credibility and earnt my trust over the years given it is a crucial entry point to potential malware to my system.
Homebrew has continued to improve performance each major version. It's certainly a lot quicker nowadays than 5 years ago. I want reliability and safety in a package manager, speed is nice to have.
I applaud competition, but something like this starts with trust zero as far as I'm concerned. If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.