Zerobrew is a newly released package manager that aims to serve as a drop‑in alternative to Homebrew by re‑using the exact same pre‑built bottles that Homebrew publishes, while changing how those bottles are installed on the user's machine. The project describes itself as experimental but notes that its creator runs it daily and encourages users to try it alongside Homebrew rather than as a full replacement.
According to the benchmark included in the repository, installing a set of 100 common formulae took 775.6 seconds with Homebrew (cold) versus 117.4 seconds with zerobrew, yielding an overall 6.6× speedup for cold installs and a 68.3× speedup when the download cache was warm. Individual packages such as ca‑certificates and python@3.14 showed warm‑install speedups exceeding 100×, which is the origin of the “up to 100x*” tagline. These gains come from zerobrew’s post‑download workflow: it skips Ruby formula evaluation, performs relocation in‑process, and links directly from a content‑addressed store that leverages APFS clonefiles for near‑zero‑overhead copying, thereby paying the download cost only once.
This image illustrates the performance claim mentioned in the article, showing the project's self‑described speed advantage over Homebrew.
Despite the impressive numbers, zerobrew’s performance is still bounded by the same network download step that limits Homebrew; cold installs are only a few times faster because the bottleneck is fetching the bottles from the network. The project acknowledges that it depends entirely on Homebrew’s bottle build farm and formula definitions, compiling nothing itself and maintaining no separate formulae. Users have reported occasional incompatibilities—for example, failures with the node package—so the documentation advises running zerobrew alongside Homebrew and cautions against completely replacing Homebrew unless the user is confident about the implications.