I installed Home-brew on a Mac. Essentially it was created to fully expose the BSD underpinnings of MacOS and to add necessary features to allow X-Code to become a fully cross platform development environment. It installs Apple's full X-code environment, as well as all the BSD development tools. Apple uses Clang for a compiler and you end up with that as well as gcc.
After setting that up. (It is automatic, no skill necessary.) I went to apps.kde.org and downloaded the source for Krita and compiled Krita for Mac OS. In about an hour I am notified that Krita.app has been moved to my Applications folder. MacOS has built in support for icc profiles and color spaces, so on the MacOS Krita is truly a professional grade drop in replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Very nice.
Probably the biggest use for Homebrew is that it can be used to update components for the BSD system. The 2 most commonly installed items with Home-brew, are the latest updates to ca-cetificates, and updates to ssl and tsl libraries. Apple provides updates for 3 years and home-brew is most often used to provide updates for far longer. As of right now security updates for the underlying BSD are provided going back for 8 years.