Show HN: Glu – installing Homebrew packages 2x faster on macOS

glu.run

6 pointshenrikklee2 comments

I wanted to see how fast Homebrew installs could get if end-to-end install time was the primary design constraint.

It turned into a package manager for macOS that uses Homebrew's bottle ecosystem, consistently ~2x faster than Homebrew on large install graphs.

It's written in Rust, but most performance ideas are independent of the language.

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How are you handling cache invalidation and mirror selection to hit that 2x boost? Curious if this works smoothly alongside standard Homebrew taps without breaking existing formulae.

Bottles are cached in a content addressed store by the sha256 from the registry install manifest. All install requests are resolved live against the registry, so there is no local metadata cache to invalidate.

There is no mirror selection, all bottles are downloaded directly from GHCR's CDN.

The speedup comes mostly from one shot resolution, intelligent download scheduling and parallelization of install and postinstall work.

Packages are installed to /opt/glustore so they don't affect Homebrew installed packages.

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