Standing on the Shoulders of Homebrew
a day ago
- #homebrew
- #package-managers
- #performance
- Zerobrew and nanobrew are fast alternatives to Homebrew, but they rely on Homebrew's core infrastructure and metadata.
- They skip slow parts of Homebrew, like evaluating Ruby scripts and handling complex package logic, which limits their coverage to simpler cases.
- Benchmark speedups often focus on warm-cache installs, which don't reflect real-world scenarios like setting up a new machine.
- The performance gains come from architectural improvements and Homebrew's existing formula.json API, not just language rewrites.
- Both projects avoid long-tail issues, such as custom Ruby hooks and platform-specific quirks, which are critical for a full package manager.
- The lack of a stable declarative package schema in Homebrew means these clients depend on an unstable DSL, posing maintenance challenges.
- Licensing choices (Apache-2.0 vs. Homebrew's BSD-2-Clause) suggest these are independent projects, not ecosystem contributions.