asdf VS HomeBrew

asdf or compatible .tool-versions file

In this article, we will use a version manager called asdf‑vm, or simply asdf.

This, but here are some things I've learned to do:

* Use a .local directory under my home directory instead of ~/bin. That's a great prefix when installing from source or tarball at the user level, keeps the top-level of the home directory from getting cluttered with /share /lib /include /etc /lib etc. etc.

* Reach for the package manager first when installing new software, unless there is a good reason not to. It makes keeping things up-to-date easy, and since I use Arch, which uses a rolling release, you pretty much get the latest stuff.

* If I can't get what I want from the package manager, I'll look at what is available using asdf-vm (https://asdf-vm.com/), and failing that, build from source or install from tarball.

* I don't use snap or the like.

I gave up on Windows over 20 years ago, and I can't say enough how liberating it has been. One of the nicest things is that there is a distro for almost every need (see https://distrowatch.com/). I use Arch; but your use case may point to a beginner-friendly distro, such as Mint, Ubuntu, etc., or a repeatable install type of distro, such as NixOS or Guix, or many others.

# Download asdf git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.15.0 # Add the following to ~/.zshrc . "$HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh" # Optional: Completions are configured by either a ZSH Framework asdf plugin # or by adding the following to your .zshrc: fpath=(${ASDF_DIR}/completions $fpath) autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

asdf is a popular version manager that uses a technique called "shimming" to switch between different versions of tools like Python, Node.js, and Ruby. It creates temporary paths to specific versions, modifying the environment to ensure that the correct version of a tool is used in different projects. However, this method can introduce performance overhead due to how these shims work.

Installation (using Homebrew): If you don't have Homebrew installed, you can get it from https://brew.sh.

Since you're on macOS, Homebrew is your friend for installing and managing software like PostgreSQL. If you don't have Homebrew installed yet, head to brew.sh and follow the installation instructions.

Homebrew is the go to for developer using MacOs to be able to install applications. It's the equivalent of Aptitude in Ubuntu.

Install Vagrant using Homebrew:

Thanks for the kind words <3

Rewrite in Rust: never :)

A non-Ruby frontend may be possible but, fundamentally, the Formula DSL is Ruby and we couldn't feasibly move to another language without breaking backwards compatibility with everything.

The "update tons of stuff you never asked for": we're working on this: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/19202

Performance in general: we're doing what we can to improve it wherever possible. Ruby makes this harder but it is getting better rather than worse at this point.

> I wonder if you can get away with not doing parallel downloads, but just keep the sequential downloads going in the background while it is installing a package?

I could be wrong, but I believe multiple people, including maintainers, have looked into exactly that :-)

(I also need to correct myself: there is some work ongoing into concurrent downloads[1]. That work hasn't hit `brew install` yet, where I imagine the question of concurrent traffic volume will become more pressing.)

[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/18278

Install glibc and patchelf using brew (Homebrew), or build from source, or use a prebuilt binary (if available). This guide uses brew. Also you can see this.