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I think I’m just not used to faster package managers and I don’t install packages often enough for it to feel disruptive to wait a few seconds. I do like tools

I think I’m just not used to faster package managers and I don’t install packages often enough for it to feel disruptive to wait a few seconds. I do like tools to be as fast as possible, though, and I’d forgotten about that update it does sometimes when I run it - that does seem to take a long time. I’ll have a look at how it works and see what the things are that take time. I would expect network traffic for updates, perhaps whatever it’s getting updates from does some processing (I’m sure it said something about GitHub), perhaps there is some dependency resolution that needs CPU... It would be interesting to compare its architecture to other package managers if they’re significantly faster.

ratww 6y ago
The slowness is mostly due to Ruby and the git pull. I contributed in the past and reimplemented it in bash, and there isn't much going on, honestly. 99% of the time, installing a package consists of downloading a few zips from their CDN, decompressing and linking. For those cases Brew could just be checking an API instead of constantly cloning the git repository. I'm quite surprised nobody has reimplemented it in Rust or Go. The architecture is quite simple compared to a normal package manager. Maybe it's just superstition: people see "package manager" and assume it's complicated instead of digging into the code and finding out how it works.