March 24, 2026
A storm in a coffee cup
Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
Lightning-fast Mac app installer drops — fans cheer, Homebrew devs cry foul
TLDR: Nanobrew claims a blazing-fast Mac app installer and “brew compatibility,” touting millisecond installs. The community is divided: some love the speed, while Homebrew maintainers and power users question the compatibility claim and warn that ecosystem features (like Ruby-based setups) matter more than raw seconds
A new Mac app installer called Nanobrew just rolled in claiming wild numbers — 3.5 milliseconds on a cached reinstall and even “7,000x faster than Homebrew.” It’s written in the Zig language and promises one tiny file that installs apps super quickly using macOS file tricks. The internet? Immediately split into camps.
On one side: speed freaks loving the vibe. One tester joked about the eternal pain of surprise database installs, and another says they’ve “been looking for something like this,” especially for app downloads (called “casks”) after Homebrew changed how it tags downloads with a security flag. On the other: the compatibility cops. Longtime Homebrew users point out their setups rely on Ruby scripts and Brewfiles (basically shopping lists in Ruby), and if Nanobrew doesn’t run Ruby, how can it be “compatible” with more than simple prebuilt packages?
Then the drama escalates: a Homebrew maintainer jumps in to say bluntly that if Nanobrew never runs Ruby, “it cannot be compatible,” and warns that many “fast new frontends” pop up every few weeks. He even teases that an official, faster Homebrew app is being built in Rust. Meanwhile, practical users shrug: “Do I need faster, or do I need my stuff to just work?”
So the vibe: Nanobrew’s speed flex vs Homebrew’s ecosystem lock-in. It’s a classic internet showdown — hype train meets reality check — with jokes, side-eyes, and plenty of “I’ll wait and see.” Read the room before you curl-pipe that installer: this brew war is just heating up
Key Points
- •Nanobrew is a macOS package manager written in Zig, installable via a curl script.
- •Benchmarks on Apple Silicon/macOS 15 show faster installs than Homebrew, including a 3.5ms warm ffmpeg install.
- •Operation pipeline: parallel dependency resolution, streaming SHA256 verification, content-addressed extraction, APFS clonefile materialization, and symlink linking.
- •Performance optimizations include APFS clonefile, parallelized tasks, native HTTP via Zig std.http.Client, direct Mach-O parsing, and batched codesign.
- •Nanobrew distributes as a single ~2MB static binary without a Ruby runtime and supports self-update via nb update.