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The problem of Homebrew is the language it's written in. Porting it into something native and faster, maybe Go, maybe Rust - will make the user experience way b
by xvilka 7y ago
The problem of Homebrew is the language it's written in. Porting it into something native and faster, maybe Go, maybe Rust - will make the user experience way better.
- saagarjha 7y agoIt seems like the team has made significant improvements in speed even without changing the language Homebrew was written in; I’m sure there’s still more low-hanging fruit they can pick before having to make such a large change.
- ddavis 7y agoI've been using Homebrew for years and I've never felt negatively about the user experience, I find it easier to use than yum for example. What do you think can be improved?
- andrewl-hn 7y agoWould it, though? Almost all the time during installation is spent downloading and extracting the tarballs and running compilers if necessary. Even updating Brew itself is almost all git.
- OskarS 7y agoRuby is not the problem at all. The vast majority of time with homebrew is spent doing git operations, downloading tarballs, running makefiles, and the like. You could rewrite the entire thing in Rust and not notice any difference. The thing that might make a difference is to build some custom infrastructure, so that `brew update` didn't have to do a `git fetch` every time, but instead downloaded the updated formula registry in a more efficient manner. But that's a lot to ask of a project like this.
- Fnoord 7y ago> The thing that might make a difference is to build some custom infrastructure, so that `brew update` didn't have to do a `git fetch` every time, but instead downloaded the updated formula registry in a more efficient manner. But that's a lot to ask of a project like this. How would this impact privacy? If I do brew search, does that impact privacy?
- saagarjha 7y agoHomebrew stores a lot of information in the Git repository that it really doesn’t need. A simple list of packages would work with the search feature and probably be faster to work with.
- sitzkrieg 7y agoim not convinced, just typing brew takes seconds to return the list of commands often
- samdixon 7y agoStill isn't a ruby issue. Likely an issue with the control flow doing things in a way that locks the front end and runs an expensive process.
- mschuster91 7y agoThe bigger problem with Homebrew IMO is that it does not follow the proper UNIX way to install packages - works for a single-user setup, but not for a multi-user one.
- cweagans 7y agoI don't see that as much of a problem. The vast majority of Macbooks are going to be single user machines anyway. If you really need multi-user support, multiple users on one machine can always install brew to their home directory (https://andrewjorgensen.com/post/install-homebrew-to-your-home-directory/ https://andrewjorgensen.com/post/install-homebrew-to-your-ho... for info)