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Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

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Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#41

Post by petcat »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #22
pxc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow they are finally getting away from Ruby? Awesome. The speed will be a nice boon

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.

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#42

Post by [deleted] »

nozzlegear wrote: post #40
halapro wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes no sense, the wording suggests it can use Homebrew's backend, not that it's a complete alternative to Homebrew. Nobody is confused about that.

I mean, I'm confused about it. The nanobrew homepage says this: > 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.

[deleted]

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#44

Post by halapro »

nozzlegear wrote: post #40
halapro wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes no sense, the wording suggests it can use Homebrew's backend, not that it's a complete alternative to Homebrew. Nobody is confused about that.

I mean, I'm confused about it. The nanobrew homepage says this: > 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.

There are many such examples for npm as well: many "compatible" managers, one registry.

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#45

Post by Onavo »

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.

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#46

Post by staticassertion »

drob518 wrote: post #7

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.

I've wanted brew to be faster. It would be a nice QoL for me.

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#47

Post by fleebee »

noahbp wrote: post #29
drob518 wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#49

Post by fny »

maxloh wrote: post #43

How does this work? AFAIK Homebrew formulae are written in Ruby [0]. Do they use some kind of Ruby parser to parse formulae? [0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/26-tahoe/Form...

It uses the Homebrew API and uses its own dependency resolver and linker to pull Homebrew's precompiled packages.

Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

#50

Post by happyopossum »

ryandrake wrote: post #24

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. 1: https://docs.brew.sh/S…

To be fair, Apple stopped providing security fixes for Mojave ~4+ years ago, and there have been 7 or 8 new os releases since then…

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything

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