zerobrew brings uv-style architecture to Homebrew packages on macOS and Linux, promising up to 100x faster installs. Install via the standalone installer (curl -fs SL https://zerobrew.rs/install | bash) or Homebrew (brew install zerobrewhq/zerobrew/zerobrew). The tool supports standard operations like install, uninstall, bundle, outdated, upgrade, reset, gc, and running packages without linking.
A performance snapshot measured on 2026-10-08 with zerobrew 0.3.5 and Homebrew 7.0.8 on a MacBook Pro (M3 Pro, 18 GB RAM) showed significant speedups. Overall, 100 packages installed 6.6x faster cold and 68.31x faster warm. The median package was 5.3x faster cold and 56x faster warm. Per-package cold ranged from 1.6x (go) to 20x (ca-certificates), while warm ranged from 18x (go) to 252x (ca-certificates).
24 of the 100 packages installed 100x faster or more warm, which is what the asterisk on the tagline refers to. Cold installs are bound by the link, while big packages like go and llvm spend nearly all cold time downloading, so both tools perform similarly there. On a slower ~69 Mbit/s connection, results were 3.3x cold and 69x warm.
Full results are available in the repository, detailing per-package comparisons between zerobrew and Homebrew.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing