Standing on the shoulders of Homebrew

zerobrew and nanobrew are alternative Homebrew clients written in Rust and Zig respectively, claiming significant speed improvements. However, they only implement the 'bottle' (pre-built binary) path and skip the hard parts: Ruby DSL evaluation, post-install hooks, and complex formulae. Their speed gains are largely possible because Homebrew already solved the metadata-without-Ruby-evaluation problem via its formula.json API. The warm-cache benchmarks they highlight measure a narrow scenario, and architectural tricks like content-addressable stores or parallel downloads aren't language-specific wins. The real bottleneck in Homebrew is the lack of a stable declarative package schema — until that exists, fast clients are fast because Homebrew already did the slow work.