Glu
installing Homebrew packages 2x faster on macOS
Details
- External ID
- 49722369
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Glu
- Website domain
- glu.run
- Launched
- Sept. 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.32854864433811803
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 20, 2026, 5:44 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 20, 2026, 5:44 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS utilities and system tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- fast homebrew package installer for macos users
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic CLI tool parsing Homebrew API manifests is straightforward, but delivering a high-performance alternative 2x faster than Homebrew requires low-level systems optimization and deep familiarity with macOS Mach-O binaries and relocation.
What it would actually take: A production version requires Rust with parallel async network downloads, concurrent tar/archive decompression, and an optimized SAT-based dependency solver. The critical difficulty lies in implementing fast Mach-O binary rewriting, dynamic linker path (install_name_tool / rpath) adjustments, and APFS clonefile/hardlink optimizations without corrupting macOS bottle installations.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Homebrew
Concerns raised: Compatibility with standard Homebrew taps and formulae
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 44 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #28 of 45 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 307 days after the earliest competitor.
- Brewse · ph · 2026-09-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Taphouse · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Homebrew 6.0.0 · hn · 2026-06-11 · 1481 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- homebrew-tools-macOS · github · 2026-09-25 · 119 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Hurry · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Grsh · hn · 2026-01-14 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Sofka · hn · 2026-08-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- codex-cli-dev.github.io · github · 2026-09-21 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.