brew install gcc too time consuming

Question

I'm doing a clean install of Mavericks, and accidentally did

brew install gcc

which is taking over half an hour, maybe more. Should I terminate it? I know now that I should have installed a specific gcc (maybe gcc48) but it's too late and my macbook air is breathing hard.

Currently done downloading all 5 dependencies, but stuck on the "Installing gcc" part. It's downloaded a gcc-4.9.1.tar.bz2, configured and built it, and is stuck on making the bootstrap.

Any advice is appreciated.

This was good advice I saw too late: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/38222/how-do-i-install-gcc-via-homebrew

Asked here first: https://superuser.com/questions/788256/brew-install-gcc-mac-os-10-9-mavericks

It takes a while to build (I think it took about 45min for me the first time). You can safely cancel if you want. It's entirely up to you. — Alexander O'Mara
Homebrew is specifically designed to do everything safely: it builds things in a temporary location, touching nothing outside that location, then installs them into an isolated Cellar, again touching nothing outside of that Cellar, and only then, if everything has worked, does it add links into /usr/local/*. — abarnert
Do you actually want gcc 4.9 for something? If you want to play with new C++14 features that clang doesn't support, or need to compile code that doesn't work with anything but gcc 4.6+, or just want to learn more about gcc, sure, definitely install it. If not, why waste time and disk space? — abarnert
Can confirm installation took 38 mins on late-2013 MacbookProR with cpu upgrade. Installation is very CPU heavy (4 cores at 100%). — sjmurphy
brew install gcc --without-multilib built in 49 minutes 50 seconds on Mac for me. — Cokes

Tim Smith Tim Smith · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-26T03:24:50

You do need gcc installed to get gfortran, and you do need a fortran compiler for scipy. Homebrew will install a "bottled" (i.e., precompiled) version of the gcc package, which is very fast, if you have the Xcode Command Line Tools installed. These are separate from XCode proper. You can install them with xcode-select --install.

There is no particular need to install a particular version of gcc (and I think those may not be bottled, so they will be equally slow).

In general, interrupting Homebrew with Ctrl+C is safe and Homebrew will automatically recover.

You may be interested in the homebrew-python tap.

brew install gcc too time consuming

3 Answers