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Why RTB? (and what it explicitly is not)

The gap

The Rust ecosystem is famously strong on sharp, small crates and deliberately light on macro-frameworks. clap, figment, tracing, miette, ratatui, reqwest, tokio are each best-in-class, but wiring them into a cohesive CLI product — plus self-update, AI, MCP, embedded docs, credentials, telemetry, scaffolding — is repeated work on every project.

The closest existing Rust neighbours are:

  • cli-batteries — thin preamble (clap + tracing-subscriber + panic/signal).
  • moonrepo/starbase — session/lifecycle model, but CLI-agnostic and moonrepo-flavoured.
  • cargo-dist / cargo-release — release packaging, not a runtime framework.

None of these fill the "opinionated, full-lifecycle, scaffolded, AI-ready" niche that Go Tool Base occupies in the Go world. RTB fills that gap.

What RTB is

  • An application framework — construct an Application, register your commands, ship.
  • Batteries-included — config, logging, errors, update, docs, AI, MCP, credentials, telemetry are wired by default behind Cargo features.
  • Idiomatic Rust — typestate builders, miette diagnostics, Arc<dyn Trait> for runtime polymorphism, generics for compile-time polymorphism, tokio structured concurrency.
  • A scaffolder — rtb new / rtb generate produce a working tool.

What RTB is not

  • Not a GTB port. GTB's Props struct, Containable dynamic config accessors, functional-options API, and package-level init() registration are non-idiomatic in Rust. RTB reaches the same outcomes with Rust's mechanisms instead.
  • Not a web framework. RTB does not compete with axum/actix. It integrates axum so your tool can expose a serve subcommand.
  • Not a TUI library. It uses ratatui and inquire; it doesn't compete with them.
  • Not an async runtime. It picks tokio and runs.
  • Not a DI container. The App struct is a plain strongly-typed context passed by cheap clone; there is no service locator, no inject! macro, no global registry.

Guiding principles

  1. Types over strings. Config is a serde::Deserialize struct, not a GetString(key) bag.
  2. Errors are values. No ErrorHandler.Check() funnel — return Result<_, miette::Report>, propagate with ?, report at the edge.
  3. Composition over inheritance. Services are composed into App, not inherited from a base class.
  4. Cargo features gate compile-time concerns. Features (the runtime enum) gates UX concerns per-invocation.
  5. Borrow the ecosystem. Every crate RTB wraps is a deliberate best-in-class pick (see the Ecosystem Survey).