How fast can we brew?
10-26, 14:10–14:35 (Europe/Berlin), Main stage

The Brew package manager is single threaded and fetches packages serially. Package managers are fast now. What could Brew do and how would it change performance?


Brew is single threaded and serial, downloads happen one after the other. Package managers are fast now, how fast could Brew be? Let's walk through the various steps Brew is taking when installing a typical package. What kind of improvement could we see? Let's talk through the structure of the actions and what we could do to improve their performance. We'll end with some more exotic strategies we could explore and their possible benefits.

Max McDonnell is a packaging system enthusiast and hobbyist. He is a Staff Engineer at Voltus Inc where he is responsible for the existence of an internal packaging system that is on its way to feature parity with more mature software that probably should have been used in the first place.

He has created a Nix-inspired package manager and build system called Bramble. It is not intended for adoption, but is a fun exploration of Nix's functionality in Go if that is of interest to others.