Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

https://nanobrew.trilok.ai/

by syrusakbary • 4 months ago

225 146 4 months ago

nanobrew.trilok.ai

an0malous2• 4 months ago

Does it reinstall postgres for every package install?

mitchitized• 4 months ago

(report card for an0malous): "Does not play nice with other students."

an0malous2• 4 months ago

It's true :')

ericcholis• 4 months ago

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 will disable this (annoying) behavior. Set it in your bashrc or zshrc.

chuckadams• 4 months ago

This might be a good thing for homebrew to adopt for the download/install process, but if it doesn't include a ruby interpreter, I have a hard time seeing how it's going to be compatible with anything but searching and installing bottles. I install most of my packages from a Brewfile, which itself is Ruby code.

alwillis3• 4 months ago

I install most of my packages from a Brewfile, which itself is Ruby code.

Same. Whatever happens, the new version should support Brewfile.

mikemcquaid4• 4 months ago

If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”.

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.

pxc5• 4 months ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 4 months ago

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

atonse• 4 months ago

Heyyyy, who are you to tell us what is and isn't compatible with homebrew?

(Just kidding, thank you for creating homebrew and your continued work on it!)

samgranieri• 4 months ago

I think Max Howell created Homebrew. I think McQuaid is the current maintainer

tfrancisl• 4 months ago

I appreciate the push for an official rust frontend. I've personally been migrating (slowly) to using nix to manage my Mac's software, but there are a ton of limitations which lead me to rely on homebrew anyway. The speed ups will be appreciated.

hirvi743• 4 months ago

I appreciate the push for an official rust frontend

Why? I think I am seriously starting to contract as case of FOMO. I feel like Rust is rapidly gaining territory everyday. I mean, that's fine and all, I suppose. I have never used it, so I have no real opinions on the language.

boobsbr• 4 months ago

Please, don't remove bottles and casks that are blocked by Gatekeeper. :˜(

forsakenharmony• 4 months ago

I also think it's a bit unfortunate, but I can also see the side of not wanting to support things that technically make macos less secure

halapro2• 4 months ago

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.

nozzlegear2• 4 months ago

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.

akdev1l5• 4 months ago

The recipes for building and installing homebrew packages are written in Ruby

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

orf• 4 months ago

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tree/main/Library/Homebrew/... for reference

runjake2• 4 months ago

Context for those unaware: the commenter, mikemcquaid, is the project lead for Homebrew.

Xunjin2• 4 months ago

Thank you, his arguments totally makes sense, only the part that makes me icky is:

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.

derefr• 4 months ago

Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually have full compatibility.

When you say "Rust frontend", is the vision that Homebrew's frontend would eventually transition to being a pure Rust project — no end-user install of portable-ruby and so forth?

If so (ignore everything below if not):

I can see how that would work for most "boring" formulae: formula JSON gets pre-baked at formula publish time; Rust frontend pulls it; discovers formula is installable via bottle; pulls bottle; never needs to execute any Ruby.

But what happens in the edge-cases there — formulae with no bottles, Ruby `post_install` blocks, and so forth? (And also, how is local formula development done?)

Is the ultimate aim of this effort, to build and embed a tiny little "Formula Ruby DSL" interpreter into the Rust frontend, that supports just enough of Ruby's syntax + semantics to execute the code that appears in practice in the bodies of real formulae methods/blocks? (I personally think that would be pretty tractable, but I imagine you might disagree.)

mikemcquaid4• 4 months ago

We will never be 100% Rust an 0% Ruby. It’s possible that 99% of users end up never running any Ruby, though. It’ll still be needed for local development and our CI. We’re optimising for speeding up the 99% case as much as possible.

yokoprime• 4 months ago

thank you for all you (and your co-maintainers) do for the community!

hirvi743• 4 months ago

What drove the choice to use Rust for an official frontend?

waterTanuki• 4 months ago

Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually have full compatibility. Hopefully this will help share effort across the wider ecosystem.

Where can I read more on this effort?

cromka• 4 months ago

Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”.

This is literally what "compatible" means, how else did you expect then to frame it?

ricardobeat2• 4 months ago

It’s more of an alternative CLI for Homebrew itself, not an alternative that happens to be compatible.

breppp• 4 months ago

I think you are doing great work with brew and I hope the Rust version is released soon

However, how is this effort different than uv vs pypi? why is this a bad thing?

ricardobeat2• 4 months ago

That is great news! Would be even more awesome if it was being ported to a more approachable language like Go or Zig, or somehow rearchitected in Ruby, but I take it that ship has sailed long ago. Ruby -> Rust is a brutal move.

anbotero• 4 months ago

Wait a minute, Homebrew is slow? I thought most of the time it takes for me is downloading and installing. I haven't noticed slowdowns anywhere else, even for the ones mentioned.

adityamwagh• 4 months ago

In it's current form, homebrew is amazing. It's not that slow and recent updates have made it really good to use. May I know the reasons for a Rust rewrite?

patabyte• 4 months ago

I'm really interested to learn more about the work on the official Rust frontend - do you have any links to share by chance?

drob5182• 4 months ago

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.

pxc5• 4 months ago

If you use the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin, running `brew` against the generated brewfile becomes the slowest part of a `darwin-rebuild switch` by far. In the fast cases, it turns something that could take 1 second into something that takes 10, which is definitely annoying when running that command is part of your process for configuration changes even when you don't update anything. Homebrew no-ops against an unchanging Brewfile are really slow.

dilap2• 4 months ago

Horses for courses, but I've stopped using brew 'cuz it's too slow, so this might bring me back!

Edit: no, it won't...

drob5182• 4 months ago

Agreed on horses for courses. Different people have different tolerances. And yea, all things being equal, faster is better, but they are almost never equal. If you don’t mind me asking, what does “too slow” mean for you in this context? Do you have a particularly complex setup? And what do you use now as an alternative and how has that impacted the update speed?

swiftcoder4• 4 months ago

I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update

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

bombcar• 4 months ago

I've never thought "only 2 seconds faster" - I've certainly thought "why is this taking half the time it takes Gentoo to recompile an entire server".

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 4 months ago

FWIW this seems to have improved in recent years. Back in the dark times of non parallelized downloads I would purposefully wait to end of day and fire the thing off before leaving

joshstrange• 4 months ago

But you can turn that behavior off, IIRC it tells you the environment variable to set if you don’t want it to do that every time it runs.

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).

saghm5• 4 months ago

I'm not sure if I just have way fewer things installed than most people or I just update more often, but I haven't experienced anything like this for years. I run `brew upgrade` probably around once every (work)day, usually right before doing a git pull or something, and then I'll quickly look at a couple emails or slack messages, and then it's always done by the time I switch back

mproud• 4 months ago

My brew update/upgrade takes forever

noahbp• 4 months ago

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.

never_inline• 4 months ago

Well, pnpm solves the storage issue, which is a more pressing reason to use it. (I don't know about deno/bun)

fleebee• 4 months ago

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.

ziml77• 4 months ago

Agreed here. The speed bottleneck I run into is simply that there's often a lot of packages that need updating, so there's a lot to download. And if anything needs to be compiled from source then the time that takes will dominate (though I think everything I currently run is thankfully pre-built)

motorpixel• 4 months ago

If I have to deal with even the mention of another package manager in the cross-platform dev ecosystem I am going to snap

staticassertion• 4 months ago

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

password43212• 4 months ago

See also: asdf and mise

https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-2365...

rconti• 4 months ago

I've been a lightweight homebrew user for many, many, many years now. I just use it to download or update a thing I need, once every 3-6mo.

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.

zerd• 4 months ago

It's ok because I rarely need it, but sometimes it's so slow I'm looking for alternative install methods while it's doing it's thing.

saghm5• 4 months ago

Brew definitely used to be a lot slower, and I used to find it very tedious. I feel like they've done a reasonably good job in improving that over the years though (with the switch to distributing binaries by default being a huge win in terms of speed). I have to wonder if stuff like this is more due to lingering feelings from before combined with the easy access to vibe coding tools. If LLM coding came a few years earlier, maybe projects like this one would have made more sense to me.

karel-3d• 4 months ago

I definitely have felt this. Homebrew is slow.

However, this is a vibe-coded app, with around 30 commits per day, which I don't let install packages on my machine.

bobbylarrybobby• 4 months ago

I have definitely wished that Homebrew would not wait for all packages to be downloaded before pouring them. It's nice that downloads happen in parallel (didn't always used to be the case iirc), but it feels like the pouring could also be done in the same parallel workflow.

pxc5• 4 months ago

I've been looking for something like this, especially to use only with casks now that Homebrew has removed support for not adding the quarantine bit. Looking forward to giving it a try!

kassadin• 4 months ago

Do you choose compatibility or speed?

nb info --cask codex-app

nb: formula '--cask' not found

nb: formula 'codex-app' not found

luizfelberti• 4 months ago

It might be good to explain how this differs from zerobrew [0], which is trying to accomplish the same thing

[0] https://github.com/lucasgelfond/zerobrew

tomComb• 4 months ago

And zerobrew, like the original Homebrew, is compatible with Linux.

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.

Alifatisk• 4 months ago

Zerobrew looks mature, I'll check it out.

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.

phist_mcgee• 4 months ago

Install zerobrew via brew as per the official instructions.
Immediately get an error saying the install path is too long and needs to be fixed as /opt/zerobrew/prefix is too many bytes.

Yeah gonna need some work.

zieka• 4 months ago

I also have a solution mostly for myself but others are welcomed to it: https://zieka.github.io/bru/

Outlined some differences here between the various projects; might be useful: https://github.com/zieka/bru?tab=readme-ov-file#how-bru-comp...

alsetmusic• 4 months ago

I'm not a Python dev, but I appreciate the motivation uv has inspired across other package managers. I tried another brew replacement called zerobrew last month. It installed packages to a different directory from homebrew, so I didn't actually test drive after seeing that. Regardless, I look forward to the competition pushing mainstream tools to improve their performance.

ryandrake2• 4 months ago

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/Support-Tiers

happyopossum• 4 months ago

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

gabagool• 4 months ago

I agree in principle but Homebrew only supports the latest 3 versions of macOS. Right now Ventura 13 which came out in October 2022 is unsupported.

rbanffy2• 4 months ago

I think MacPorts still supports PowerPC Macs. I would need to rebuild my G5 to verify it because the hard disk is long dead, but last time I checked, it worked.

I get it - it’s a different beast with very different ideas behind it, but MacPorts is BSD-solid, and that’s a lot.

skybrian• 4 months ago

True, but I think you still want to avoid Homebrew if you're interested in older Mac versions. A specific project might have some support for the version you're interested in. For example, the Go 1.23 toolchain (which isn't the latest version) supports Mac releases back to Big Sur.

password43212• 4 months ago

Yes MacPorts is the way. I switched after a new MacOS release meant mine was too old - brew update uninstalled a bunch of stuff I had been using then it stopped and let me know.

There's also https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher for the adventurous.

maxkfranz• 4 months ago

You could use the OpenCode legacy patcher to upgrade to v15/Sequoia: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

ryandrake2• 4 months ago

Sure, but this might win you a couple of years max. Homebrew's "Support Tiers" page, which I linked, also addresses OCLP users, going so far as to specify a minimum Intel architecture. So, even if you use OCLP to allow support for newer OS versions, eventually your CPU architecture will be too old and you're back in Tier 3.

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.

yabutlivnWoods• 4 months ago

Run Linux on it. Apple has cut that OS off anyway. Would be safer security wise to have an OS that's updated

tekronis• 4 months ago

What did you find surprising about MacPorts? And if you had any gripes to share, what would they be?

tantalor• 4 months ago

And why does speed matter in this case?

manlymuppet• 4 months ago

If we get the Bun-ification of every package manager and language ecosystem that would be an awesome thing. This is a great trend.

maxloh• 4 months ago

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...

fny• 4 months ago

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

Onavo• 4 months ago

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.

marksully• 4 months ago

what happens if I test this tool by installing some packages and then remove (the tool)? will I still be able to use Homebrew to manage these new packages?

12_throw_away• 4 months ago

So, A) to what extent is this vibe coded? And B) what is "trilok.ai" where you download it from?

themadsens• 4 months ago

I naively assumed it would work on the already installed homebrew packages. No such luck.

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 ..

hsaliak• 4 months ago

This is most certainly vibed with a few optimization focused prompts. Yes - performance is a feature, but so is lack of risk.

MoonWalk• 4 months ago

Inaccessible: net::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

tzs• 4 months ago

OT: speaking of Homebrew, I made an incorrect assumption about it that eventually led to some problems. It was me being stupid, but I bet others have made the same mistake but not yet hit problems. Hence this comment.

My mistake was when I upgraded from my 2017 iMac (Intel processor) to an Apple silicon Mac at the start of 2024 and migrated via Time Machine I did not do anything extra specifically for Homebrew. I just assumed that as things got updated via the normal periodic Homebrew updates I run it would start grabbing the Apple silicon binaries for binary things it installed.

It turn out that is wrong. They made Apple silicon Homebrew kind of independent of Intel Homebrew. Intel Homebrew uses /usr/local and Apple silicon Homebrew uses /opt/homebrew. This allows having both native and Intel Homebrew installed at the same time if you need both.

The correct way to migrate from an Intel Mac to an Apple silicon Mac is to install Apple silicon Homebrew on the new Mac, and then install all the packages you want. Intel Homebrew works fine on Apple silicon Macs so you can use the Intel Homebrew that migrated via Time Machine to make the package list to use with Apple silicon Homebrew (or you can make it on the old Mac).

I only noticed this because I was trying to build something from source using some libraries that were installed via Homebrew and running into problems. An LLM was helping figure this out and it was telling me I might have to manually symlink those libraries from where they were in /opt/homebrew to where the build process for the thing I was building expected to find them and I didn't have a /opt/homebrew. The libraries were somewhere in /usr/local. I then noticed those libraries were not for Apple silicon, checked other things installed view Homebrew and saw nothing was for Apple silicon, and realized I had the wrong Homebrew.

hirvi743• 4 months ago

Why does the speed of a package manager matter? I'm being sincere too. I have used countless package managers, and speed is not an attribute of any of them that I have noticed.

coldtea• 4 months ago

Tried to install a package with it, it failed.

Tried the same package with brew. Worked like a charm.

Uninstalled nanobrew.

denkmoon• 4 months ago

Brew is a leaky piece of crap. nix 4 lyf. Seriously, I used to hate any time I needed to install something with brew not knowing if it was going to break everything else, since using nixpkgs for my macos dev requirements it's been so much nicer.

sanderwebs• 4 months ago

I've found brew so painful that I switched to nix. Nix unfortunately is painful in its own way. However, I recently discovered devbox which is a wrapper around nix. It works really well as a package manager. Just run "devbox global add <package>"

commandersaki• 4 months ago

This thread invigorated my interest in Nix to manage my Mac environment.

I already have a Brewfile in my dotfiles stored in git, but wanted a way to setup all the little things on my Mac like trackpad settings, dock settings, file associations, etc. nix-darwin is the obvious solution.

Gave the task to ChatGPT and it came back saying it's a good way to get started, but then offered a middle-ground of an idempotent script to set things up. So I investigated the latter, and after a couple of minutes I now have a setupmac() function in my .bash_profile (yeah I use bash) which mostly consists of a bunch of 'defaults' commands and a few other things, and now continue with brew for managing software and setupmac() to setup everything else, and of course manually manage my dotfiles for ghostty/nvim.

I wish I had this earlier, because I just set myself up on 3 different Macs in the last week or so. I'm also glad I don't need to learn a new language and tooling for something pretty simple. Everything is a bit disjointed and not as automated as a proper nix setup and doesn't have that fidelity that nix has, but it's straight-forward, compact in that it sits in my brain easily, and easy to execute.

bibimsz• 4 months ago

is this going to be like litellm?

orefalo• 4 months ago

well nanobrew is not on brew!

NamlchakKhandro• 4 months ago

No one should be using brew.

It's terrible

Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

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