Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

3/24/2026 at 2:09:12 PM

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.

by mikemcquaid

3/24/2026 at 5:05:57 PM

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

by runjake

3/24/2026 at 5:21:26 PM

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.

by Xunjin

3/25/2026 at 1:16:56 AM

> People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.

Alternatives are always good but IMO brew is just not something I interact with all that much and to me it's "good enough". It works and does what I expect, although to be fair maybe I'm on the happy path <shrug>.

by bentcorner

3/24/2026 at 5:54:32 PM

Since I enabled HOMEBREW_DOWNLOAD_CONCURRENCY, downloads have improved for me to the point where download speed is no longer an issue.

by alwillis

3/24/2026 at 11:38:14 PM

If your version is 5.0.0 or newer, concurrency is already active by default.

https://brew.sh/2025/11/12/homebrew-5.0.0/

by firecall

3/25/2026 at 12:57:08 AM

Thanks for that. And here I was somehow hanging around on 4.5.3.

by pugio

3/24/2026 at 7:33:40 PM

Good to know! I was doing this with a hacky one-liner but wasn't aware of this flag. I think the sequential build/install process is the agonizing bit though.

by brailsafe

3/24/2026 at 11:51:30 PM

Yeah I don’t know how people are saying it’s slow. If you have 5000 packages installed maybe?

by naikrovek

3/24/2026 at 8:32:23 PM

> Alternatives often are not a bad thing.

Exactly. I’ve been using MacPorts for ages and I love it.

/me ducks.

by rbanffy

3/24/2026 at 5:43:11 PM

Point noted! I took it as a tongue-in-cheek phrasing of "agentically coded". Hopefully, that's right.

by runjake

3/24/2026 at 8:12:31 PM

I don't see where he said it's a bad thing, or even implied it. As I see it, he did imply that superlatives like THE FASTEST PACKAGE MANAGER aren't worth much in this environment.

by mpalmer

3/24/2026 at 5:34:14 PM

[dead]

by huflungdung

3/24/2026 at 7:22:12 PM

Yeah, tbh homebrew is slow as fuck. It literally took 30 minutes to install aws cli on my 2020 mbp. I will happily flock to every new version that's faster.

by jazzpush2

3/24/2026 at 2:36:05 PM

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.

by pxc

3/24/2026 at 3:05:10 PM

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

by SOLAR_FIELDS

3/24/2026 at 4:13:00 PM

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.

by petcat

3/24/2026 at 6:05:15 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)

by kelvie

3/24/2026 at 6:38:40 PM

pacman is faster simply because it does less things and it supports less use cases.

For example pacman does not need to validate the system for partial upgrades because those are unsupported on Arch and if the system is borked then it’s yours to fix.

by akdev1l

3/25/2026 at 12:15:09 AM

Less charitably, pacman is fast because it's wrong. The dependency resolver is wrong; it fails to find correct answers to dependency resolution problems even when correct answers are available.

by pxc

3/24/2026 at 5:44:27 PM

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

by novok

3/25/2026 at 3:05:46 AM

Bazel has other problems

by SlightlyLeftPad

3/25/2026 at 3:17:52 AM

Could you elaborate?

by ukuina

3/25/2026 at 3:46:01 AM

Sure,

* it’s purpose built for mega-sized monorepo models like Google (the same company that created it)

* it’s not at all beginner friendly, it’s complex mishmash of three separate constructs in their own right (build files, workspace setup, starlark), which makes it slow to ramp new engineers on.

* even simple projects require a ton of setup

* requires dedicated remote cache to be performant, which is also not trivial to configure

* requires deep bazel knowledge to troubleshoot through its verbose unclear error logs.

Because of all that, it’s extremely painful to use for anything small/medium in scale.

by SlightlyLeftPad

3/24/2026 at 6:34:45 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)

by akdev1l

3/24/2026 at 7:34:31 PM

> dnf < 5 was still performing similarly to yum (and it was also implemented in python)

I'm perhaps not properly understanding your comment. If the algorithmic changes were responsible for the improved speed, why did the Python version of dnf perform similarly to yum?

by wavemode

3/24/2026 at 8:06:28 PM

Because dnf4 used the same dependency resolution as yum but they revamped it in dnf5 (it was initially supposed to be a whole new package manager with a different name)

by akdev1l

3/24/2026 at 6:46:15 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?

by mhurron

3/25/2026 at 2:58:37 AM

This. There are much better reasons to abandon brew than “it’s slow”.

by what

3/25/2026 at 1:32:43 AM

Is Ruby really the speed bottleneck in Homebrew? I would assume it would be due to file operations (and download operations), not choice of programming language.

by joemi

3/25/2026 at 3:15:55 AM

Largely agree, though some things are notably difficult in some languages. Things like true concurrency for example didn’t come as naturally in Ruby because of the global interpreter lock. Of course there are third party libs, and workarounds though. Newer versions of Ruby bring it more natively, and as we’ve seen, Homebrew has adopted and makes use of that experimentally for a while, and the default relatively recently.

I can’t say that’s the only reason it’s slow of course. I’m on the “I don’t use it often enough for it to be a problem at all” side of the fence.

by SlightlyLeftPad

3/24/2026 at 6:23:31 PM

I would guess this change builds on the existing json endpoints for package metadata but that the Ruby DSL is remaining intact.

I think how to marry the Ruby formulas and a Rust frontend is something the Homebrew devs can figure out and I'm interested to see where it goes, but I don't really care whether Ruby "goes away" from Homebrew in the end or not. It's a lovely language, so if they can keep it for their DSL but improve client performance I think that's great.

by pxc

3/24/2026 at 8:25:32 PM

> 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.)

by derefr

3/25/2026 at 7:07:04 AM

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.

by mikemcquaid

3/25/2026 at 9:30:43 AM

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?

by breppp

3/25/2026 at 10:01:53 AM

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.

by ricardobeat

3/24/2026 at 4:05:38 PM

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

by orf

3/24/2026 at 3:30:38 PM

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!)

by atonse

3/24/2026 at 7:30:27 PM

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

by samgranieri

3/25/2026 at 8:51:20 AM

> 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?

by cromka

3/25/2026 at 9:58:35 AM

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

by ricardobeat

3/24/2026 at 3:50:58 PM

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.

by tfrancisl

3/24/2026 at 11:23:05 PM

> 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.

by hirvi74

3/24/2026 at 3:56:08 PM

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

by boobsbr

3/25/2026 at 9:46:50 AM

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

by forsakenharmony

3/25/2026 at 1:47:03 AM

McQuaid is correct in the strict sense, but the interesting question is what percentage of actually installed formulae use Ruby DSL features beyond archive extraction and path manipulation. My guess is it's a small minority of what most developers have on their machines.

The real compatibility test isn't "runs all Homebrew formulae" — it's "runs the 15-20 formulae each developer actually uses." A tool that handles those correctly and fails clearly on edge cases is more useful in practice than a technically complete implementation that's slower.

What's missing from this thread is any data on that surface area, not more benchmark numbers.

by AbanoubRodolf

3/24/2026 at 4:02:56 PM

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.

by halapro

3/24/2026 at 6:40:25 PM

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

by akdev1l

3/24/2026 at 7:25:20 PM

Is this still true since they swapped to distributing binaries rather than building from source on each install? It's been years since I last installed something from homebrew that built from source, so something that could install the same binaries would be compatible from my standpoint.

That said, it's also been a while since I've really had any huge complaints about brew's speed. I use Linux on my personal machines, and the difference in experience with my preferred Linux distro's package manager and brew used to be laughable. To their credit, nowadays, brew largely feels "good enough", so I honestly wouldn't even argue for porting from Ruby based on performance needs at this point. I suspect part of the motivation might be around concerns about relying on the runtime to be available. Brew's use of Ruby comes from a time when it was more typical for people to rely on the versions of Python and Ruby that were shipped with MacOS, but nowadays a lot of people are probably more likely to use tooling from brew itself to manage those, and making everything native avoids the need to bootstrap from an existing runtime.

by saghm

3/24/2026 at 8:04:07 PM

It can revert back to building from source under some cases and I still think even when doing binary downloads it will execute install hooks which are ruby inside the recipe

I would agree with you that probably Ruby itself is probably not the bottleneck (except maybe for depsolving cuz that’s cpu bound)

by akdev1l

3/24/2026 at 4:11:45 PM

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.

by nozzlegear

3/24/2026 at 4:23:54 PM

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

by halapro

3/24/2026 at 4:54:55 PM

Sorry, examples of what? Package managers that present themselves as replacements for other package managers? Or package managers that aren't compatible with the registry they're supposed to be compatible with? Your use of scare quotes is confusing.

by nozzlegear

3/24/2026 at 5:41:15 PM

pnmp, npm, yard all have different lockfiles, all use the same registry format (and the same registry itself), all try to stay compatible in other ways.

You won't be having situation where one uses yarn and someone uses pnpm on the same project tho.

by 0x457

3/24/2026 at 11:03:36 PM

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

by yokoprime

3/25/2026 at 4:04:01 AM

> 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?

by waterTanuki

3/24/2026 at 11:09:21 PM

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

by hirvi74

3/24/2026 at 2:24:32 PM

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.

by drob518

3/24/2026 at 2:40:00 PM

> 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

by swiftcoder

3/24/2026 at 2:58:52 PM

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".

by bombcar

3/24/2026 at 3:04:23 PM

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).

by joshstrange

3/24/2026 at 3:44:56 PM

I'd be much happier if it were on a background job, than arbitrarily running when I invoke a command

by swiftcoder

3/24/2026 at 3:25:34 PM

Terrible default behavior is a great reason to abandon a software package.

by slackfan

3/24/2026 at 7:32:43 PM

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

by saghm

3/25/2026 at 3:04:31 AM

What? Why are you running brew upgrade every day?

by what

3/25/2026 at 7:34:16 AM

To upgrade my packages? I'm not sure I understand the question. That's how I use pretty much all of my systems that have package managers.

by saghm

3/25/2026 at 8:39:21 AM

But why do you want daily upgrades? Most of us want to wait a little while for the bugs to be worked out of fresh releases. And hey, if everything is working today... why would I want to risk potential breaking changes?

by swiftcoder

3/24/2026 at 3:04:19 PM

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

by SOLAR_FIELDS

3/24/2026 at 2:33:54 PM

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.

by pxc

3/24/2026 at 6:00:45 PM

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.

by rconti

3/25/2026 at 4:05:36 AM

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.

by zerd

3/24/2026 at 4:07:27 PM

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)

by ziml77

3/24/2026 at 7:29:52 PM

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.

by saghm

3/24/2026 at 4:08:57 PM

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

by motorpixel

3/24/2026 at 3:32:05 PM

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.

by noahbp

3/24/2026 at 4:32:25 PM

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.

by fleebee

3/24/2026 at 5:59:54 PM

bun is my go to for npm packages; it’s so much better and faster than npm, it’s not funny.

Never had any issues.

by alwillis

3/24/2026 at 3:34:30 PM

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

by never_inline

3/24/2026 at 2:34:12 PM

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...

by dilap

3/24/2026 at 2:41:52 PM

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?

by drob518

3/24/2026 at 6:19:43 PM

I wish I could remember the details -- I know I got annoyed with things being slow and when I got a new computer decided to go the no-homebrew route. I'm using nix, and it seems fine so far, but I also really don't understand it at all, which is a little concerning. :-)

by dilap

3/24/2026 at 3:13:07 PM

My brew update/upgrade takes forever

by mproud

3/24/2026 at 4:30:44 PM

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

by staticassertion

3/24/2026 at 5:06:57 PM

See also: asdf and mise

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

by password4321

3/24/2026 at 6:43:53 PM

[dead]

by devkarev

3/24/2026 at 3:19:34 PM

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

by ryandrake

3/24/2026 at 4:54:17 PM

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

by happyopossum

3/24/2026 at 8:42:03 PM

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.

by rbanffy

3/24/2026 at 5:30:01 PM

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.

by gabagool

3/24/2026 at 5:56:15 PM

I still think that's entirely fair for a power user tool like homebrew. With the upgrade rates of macOS that probably means that's 98% of the users would be covered. Expecting an open source project to accept bug requests from a bigger variety of versions that then would need test devices on these versions to replicate issues sounds unrealistic. Bigger companies, or Apple itself I would hold to much higher standards when it comes to that.

by dewey

3/24/2026 at 6:41:48 PM

> power user tool like homebrew.

That makes no sense then. A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. Take the training wheels off it and then it'll be a power user tool.

by bsagdiyev

3/24/2026 at 6:44:43 PM

> A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason.

No doubt there are edge cases like that, but I don't fault a project for not catering to the < 1% of users who would fall into that bucket and would probably be the ones that cause trickier support cases. These would maybe also be the user that could just install it without homebrew then, it's not like homebrew is the only way to install software.

by dewey

3/24/2026 at 10:07:30 PM

This is not an edge case. Most HN commenters describe the latest two versions of macOS as being objectively worse than earlier versions: slower, less stable, more broken. There are significant numbers of “power users” who deliberately avoid upgrading or have actively downgraded macOS to Sonoma because they care about their computing experience.

by edschofield

3/24/2026 at 10:15:12 PM

People who downgraded to Sonoma are the definition of an edge case, maybe you hear from some of them on HN and it sounds like a big group but this is a niche of a niche.

https://telemetrydeck.com/survey/apple/macOS/versions/

by dewey

3/24/2026 at 6:41:24 PM

brew used to say, more or less, "This OS is old and unsupported. Don't submit bug reports. If you have problems, too bad. If you submit a PR to fix something, we might merge it". Fair enough, right? Now it just says, "Go fuck yourself, grandpa."

by ksherlock

3/25/2026 at 1:25:58 AM

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.

by skybrian

3/24/2026 at 6:13:26 PM

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

by yabutlivnWoods

3/24/2026 at 5:01:05 PM

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.

by password4321

3/24/2026 at 5:08:39 PM

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

by maxkfranz

3/24/2026 at 5:26:30 PM

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.

by ryandrake

3/24/2026 at 6:18:24 PM

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 ..

by themadsens

3/24/2026 at 2:42:19 PM

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

by luizfelberti

3/24/2026 at 5:04:49 PM

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.

by Alifatisk

3/24/2026 at 3:30:38 PM

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.

by tomComb

3/24/2026 at 8:24:15 PM

>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.

by phist_mcgee

3/24/2026 at 2:04:33 PM

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.

by chuckadams

3/24/2026 at 6:02:25 PM

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

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

by alwillis

3/24/2026 at 8:25:09 PM

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.

by tzs

3/25/2026 at 12:02:30 AM

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.

by denkmoon

3/25/2026 at 2:17:07 AM

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>"

by sanderwebs

3/25/2026 at 7:22:37 AM

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.

by commandersaki

3/24/2026 at 2:34:47 PM

Do you choose compatibility or speed?

nb info --cask codex-app

nb: formula '--cask' not found

nb: formula 'codex-app' not found

by kassadin

3/24/2026 at 2:54:35 PM

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.

by alsetmusic

3/24/2026 at 4:16:49 PM

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...

by maxloh

3/24/2026 at 4:45:23 PM

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

by fny

3/24/2026 at 3:39:40 PM

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

by manlymuppet

3/24/2026 at 1:52:38 PM

Does it reinstall postgres for every package install?

by an0malous

3/24/2026 at 2:03:48 PM

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

by ericcholis

3/24/2026 at 1:55:08 PM

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

by mitchitized

3/24/2026 at 2:33:43 PM

It's true :')

by an0malous

3/24/2026 at 5:25:36 PM

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

by 12_throw_away

3/24/2026 at 3:24:01 PM

And why does speed matter in this case?

by tantalor

3/25/2026 at 12:01:38 AM

Tried to install a package with it, it failed.

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

Uninstalled nanobrew.

by coldtea

3/24/2026 at 2:30:46 PM

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!

by pxc

3/24/2026 at 7:21:18 PM

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

by hsaliak

3/25/2026 at 6:39:04 AM

well nanobrew is not on brew!

by orefalo

3/24/2026 at 7:53:09 PM

Inaccessible: net::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

by MoonWalk

3/24/2026 at 4:36:01 PM

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?

by marksully

3/24/2026 at 4:26:19 PM

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.

by Onavo

3/24/2026 at 11:05:08 PM

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.

by hirvi74

3/25/2026 at 7:28:25 AM

No one should be using brew.

It's terrible

by NamlchakKhandro

3/25/2026 at 3:28:55 AM

is this going to be like litellm?

by bibimsz

3/24/2026 at 5:35:05 PM

[flagged]

by peytongreen_dev

3/24/2026 at 8:27:40 PM

[dead]

by ryguz