asdf VS homebrew-core

Compare asdf vs homebrew-core and see what are their differences.

asdf

Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more (by asdf-vm)

homebrew-core

🍻 Default formulae for the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux) (by Homebrew)
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asdf homebrew-core
339 130
20,215 13,136
3.0% 1.1%
7.9 10.0
11 days ago 5 days ago
Shell Ruby
MIT License BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

asdf

Posts with mentions or reviews of asdf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-25.
  • Volta – Fastest Node version manager in Rust
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

    https://asdf-vm.com/

  • Pyenv – lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    https://asdf-vm.com/ ASDF is better because it works with many more languages, other than only Python, like Rust, Go, Node, etc, and other tools, such as AWS/Google/Firebase/Azure CLIs.
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

    These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

    We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

  • A Journey to Find an Ultimate Development Environment
    13 projects | dev.to | 2 Feb 2024
    The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).
  • Beginners Intro to Trunk Based Development
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).
  • Practical Guide to Trunk Based Development
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:
  • Criando seu ambiente com ASDF
    4 projects | dev.to | 29 Dec 2023
    git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.13.1
    4 projects | dev.to | 29 Dec 2023
  • Kotlin version manager
    2 projects | /r/Kotlin | 7 Dec 2023
    I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.
  • How do i keep my "devops tool" always up to date in a smart way ?
    2 projects | /r/devops | 6 Dec 2023
    I use the asdf version manager.

homebrew-core

Posts with mentions or reviews of homebrew-core. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-25.
  • Pyenv – lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    If I pin a version of Python, isn't that going to wreck any tooling that depends on it? Unless you're saying have multiple versions of Python installed.

    This is practically the only remaining annoyance I have with the Python ecosystem (relative imports aside). I use some tools, like Glances [0] whose formula relies on a much newer version (3.12) than the actual package requires (3.8) [1].

    So when there's a Python update, all of those update as well. I thought I'd fixed this with pipx, but in a way that's worse, because the venvs it builds depend on a specific version of Python existing, which doesn't work well with brew always wanting to upgrade it.

    I want a stable, system-level Python that I don't touch, don't add packages to, and which only exists as a dependency for anything that needs it. If an update would break a package I have installed (due to Python library deprecation, etc.), it should warn me before updating. Otherwise, I don't care, as long as any symlinks are taken care of.

    Separately, I want a stable, user-level Python that I can do whatever I want to. Nothing updates it automatically. I can accomplish this by compiling Python and using `make altinstall`, but if there's a better way, I'd love to hear about it.

    [0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/20e744191e74d...

    [1]: https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    > right, but now you know even less about your setup when you some roadblock

    This is the same with a binary though. And with homebrew, you can't follow patches or flags used or if they change.

    - https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/c964ad7fa53ad...

    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    Thanks for taking the time. Can you help me understand? Because I didn't get this from the devs.

    Just looking at a random formula, am I correct to understand that this will use python 3.10 and NOT 3.12?[0] I understand ones like this[1] where there's a note about the issue with newer versions.

    What I'm trying to understand is if the python version is specified by the formula or it will default to the newest version. If it requires it to be specified in the formula then doesn't this make it contingent on the maintainer upgrading it every python version? I didn't verify [0], but it looks like it should work with later versions of python, and it it is still using 3.10 then isn't that essentially the maintainers "fault?" Because that's my concern. I can't see how something like this stays updated when it requires a maintainer to update. Seems better to have a >=3.10 and then do ==3.10 if only 3.10 works (odd) or >=3.10 <3.12 if it works for 10 and 11 but not 12. Especially since formulas are often made by people that are not the package developers themselves and we're just reliant upon someone keeping up. I'd rather break upon a new version than have many old pythons installed. I know there's no perfect solution, but we're talking about failure modes. And fwiw, I'd rather it try to use the system or environment python rather than installing a unique version. It just gets confusing when you need to add dependencies for optional stuff that wasn't included in the formula and is extremely non-obvious to a new user.

    [0] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/12a0f6bbbeda8...

    [1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/12a0f6bbbeda8...

  • Apple curl security incident 12604
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2024
  • Cowsay
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2024
    definitely be careful about using fortune in a corporate environment or public space if you don't know what dat files you are using or you might just get an extremely unwelcome surprise.

    I was practicing a presentation and used to use "fortune" all the time. I forget exactly what it output but I remember being absolutely mortified about what could have happened if that had popped up during an internal company tech talk.

    Kudos to brew for keeping unsuspecting people safe

    https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/3fb3c4c3e55...

  • Ask HN: Trouble with a Stargate
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2024
    I'm sorry to be asking this as I find it a bit silly, but it's blocking my PR [3], so could a few of you star the project on Github [1] to get my PR to run?

    [1] https://github.com/laktak/chkbit-py

    [2] https://brew.sh

    [3] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/160018

  • Simulate an Ubuntu-like VM inside macOS
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
  • Homebrew team's developer harassment. They won't remove my software?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jan 2024
  • Adding Build Provenance to Homebrew
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
    Reproducible… but unsupported. Nice.

    https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/108964#issu...

  • Bitwarden Broken in Linux
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing asdf and homebrew-core you can also consider the following projects:

SDKMan - The SDKMAN! Command Line Interface

pyenv - Simple Python version management

rbenv - Manage your app's Ruby environment

nvm - Node Version Manager - POSIX-compliant bash script to manage multiple active node.js versions

volta - Volta: JS Toolchains as Code. ⚡

HomeBrew - 🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)

mise - dev tools, env vars, task runner

jenv - Manage your Java environment

nvm for Windows - A node.js version management utility for Windows. Ironically written in Go.

fnm - 🚀 Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in Rust

RVM - Ruby enVironment Manager (RVM)

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager