Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Positioning and Compatibility

  • Nanobrew markets itself as “the fastest macOS package manager” and a Homebrew replacement, but actually sits on top of Homebrew’s CDN, CI, bottles, and JSON APIs.
  • It does not execute Ruby, so it can’t be fully compatible with Homebrew’s Ruby-based formula DSL, especially for builds from source, post_install hooks, or complex formulas.
  • Several commenters argue that “compatible” is overstated; it’s effectively a faster, partial client for Homebrew’s binary packages.
  • It installs its own package tree, separate from existing Homebrew installs, so it cannot manage already-installed brew packages.

Performance and Whether Speed Matters

  • Some users are frustrated by Homebrew’s slowness: long auto-updates, slow Brewfile runs, and slow no-op checks, especially in workflows like Nix-Darwin rebuilds.
  • Others say Brew has improved (binaries, concurrency) and is “fast enough,” since they run it infrequently and don’t mind a short pause.
  • There’s debate over whether language choice (Ruby vs Rust/Zig) is the real bottleneck versus algorithms, IO, or dependency resolution.

Homebrew’s Rust Frontend and Architecture

  • Homebrew is developing an official Rust frontend leveraging its JSON metadata APIs while keeping Ruby formulas.
  • Discussion centers on how a Rust client will handle edge cases (no bottles, Ruby hooks, local formula development) and whether it might embed a minimal Ruby interpreter or a DSL-specific interpreter.
  • Some highlight the advantage of Homebrew exposing comprehensive JSON so alternative clients can exist at all.

Alternatives and Related Tools

  • Comparisons are drawn to other “faster frontends” in ecosystems (pnpm/yarn/bun vs npm; uv-inspired tools).
  • Zerobrew is mentioned as a similar project, more mature and Linux-compatible, but also experimental and recommended alongside Homebrew.
  • Multiple users prefer Nix (sometimes via wrappers like devbox) or MacPorts, citing Brew’s slowness, leaky behavior, or dropped support for older macOS.

Old macOS and Support Tiers

  • Some users are unhappy that Homebrew only supports recent macOS versions and increasingly drops Intel/older hardware.
  • Others argue that maintaining broader OS support is unreasonable for a volunteer project, and suggest alternatives like MacPorts or Linux.