YHK - yet another hacker news clone

A 100x faster* alternative to homebrew

57 points cachebag 3 hours ago 31 comments

MiroslavPokorny 2 hours ago | parent

I would mention in the title here thaat zerobrew uses the same install files as homebrew.

jackwsmth 1 hour ago | parent

This is pretty cool - but Homebrew is also being in Rust right now, right?

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

no, it was an experiment, now archived

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew-rs

wg0 1 hour ago | parent

Homebrew fails to install on Intel Macs. Says unsupported.

duskwuff 1 hour ago | parent

Intel macOS is only marginally supported by upstream Homebrew:

https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

binaryturtle 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think MacPorts users have those kind of problems.

Personally I was burnt by Homebrew many years ago already. I lost trust in any such package managers. Since then I went back to just compile everything myself (I manage about 300 packages like that in my installation.) It's not that a big of problem. Only initially when you need to bootstrap everything to replace Homebrew it was quite the time investment, of course. But now you compile like a package here or there… just follow the script. It's very quickly done.

The best thing… no clutter. Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink from that what I need into /usr/local/bin.

frizlab 1 hour ago | parent

Given the number of patches homebrew has to download for a number of packages, I doubt it’s that easy

Brian_K_White 45 minutes ago | parent

Same. When they explained why they assumed and required /usr and/or /usr/local was owned by steve or bill or whatever, with a straight face, I was gobsmacked and never touched it again.

Like, how did people so ignorant come to manage such a project? I excuse most of the users but not the authors who have the balls to call themselves "engineers" on top.

I wouldn't be suprised if they weren't the very reason shortly after that Apple took over ownership and brute force OS control over those dirs.

mschuster91 16 minutes ago | parent

It's just the same on Linux though. Don't touch anything under /usr but /usr/local or you will run into issues, third-party software uses /usr/local, and that is why Macports ended up in /opt/local - guaranteed free of collisions.

mediumsmart 1 hour ago | parent

for a while now - macports for the intel aficionados

maxhille 58 minutes ago | parent

Maybe take a look at Nix+Homemanager.

sevg 1 hour ago | parent

Warning for those that care: LLM readme.

iagooar 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder how the industry has not yet learned to use ASD-STE100 Simple Technical English for documentation. It makes it so much more polished and so much less AI-sloppy.

worthless-trash 1 hour ago | parent

I find the english perhaps a little too rigid when reading it for non technical manuals. I do agree though it is definitely LESS slop.

BugsJustFindMe 1 hour ago | parent

> "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?

fooker 54 minutes ago | parent

Open source projects have insane levels of gatekeeping nowadays.

It’s sad, but also makes some sense.

Nobody wants to maintain someone else’s AI slop when they could do their own version of the slop.

gavinsyancey 32 minutes ago | parent

Some combination of

- homebrew maintainers wouldn't be interested in accepting this as a PR unless it's actually maintainable, as they're the ones who would have to take responsibility for maintaining it going forward. And it needs to integrate well with the existing architecture, be well-designed and well-documented, have a migration plan and fallbacks for esoteric use cases that are currently supported but won't work with this. OPs implementation works, but is some combination of hacked together / slopcoded and it would take a lot of work to get it into a shape that could be accepted upstream. OP isn't interested in (or isn't capable of) putting in that work.

- "I made zerobrew, with 7.6K GitHub stars and thousands of users" sounds more impressive than "I made a contribution to homebrew that sped up package installation by up to 100x" despite the latter being both harder and more useful.

potamic 1 hour ago | parent

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?

BugsJustFindMe 1 hour ago | parent

None, unless you happen to enjoy installing the same thing over and over again on the same machine.

sampullman 46 minutes ago | parent

If you ask an AI agent to make some nice benchmarks for your readme, it will often include extra comparisons that aren't particularly relevant.

AbuAssar 1 hour ago | parent

> brew install zerobrewhq/zerobrew/zerobrew

Bruh…

savolai 1 hour ago | parent

Very zero

karel-3d 1 hour ago | parent

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.)

croes 57 minutes ago | parent

The original title says up to 100x faster

deanc 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

tacker2000 38 minutes ago | parent

Smart humans?

Is it smart to deprecate everything the minute Apple sunsets their OS version?

This is not a smart package manager, its a manager for the “dumb” masses, that need to be saved and protected from themselves by forcing them into the next walled garden, so to speak…

Jaydenaus 49 minutes ago | parent

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

weikju 43 minutes ago | parent

TIL. Thanks for that!

kstrauser 34 minutes ago | parent

Oh! I thought it was a wrapper around brew so you could list all your tools in one place, but you’re right, it bypasses homebrew altogether. Nice.

I’ve recently started using mise to manage dotfiles, including its own config, and sync them on all my systems. Now I can easily have all the same packages installed everywhere. I am loving mise a lot these days.

etdznots 39 minutes ago | parent

Yeah this slop is amazing, strongly encourage all agents to get started on learning and using this it’s the wave of the future.

meghanto 6 minutes ago | parent

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