Architecture Deep Dive

UniRTM is engineered from the ground up to be a high-performance, 100% native Go application. Unlike legacy tool managers that rely heavily on shell scripts, bash hooks, or Ruby plugins, UniRTM executes directly as a compiled binary. This design choice provides exceptional speed, strict memory safety, and cross-platform reliability.

Core Tenets

1. Zero Shell Pollution: UniRTM does not inject complex initialization scripts into your .bashrc or .zshrc. It dynamically modifies the PATH during tool execution and immediately restores it.
2. Native Performance: By avoiding subshells (bash -c), UniRTM reduces the overhead of process spawning to almost zero.
3. Concurrency First: All heavy operations—such as remote version resolution, artifact downloading, and checksum validation—are executed concurrently using Go's lightweight goroutines.

High-Level Architecture

The UniRTM core is divided into four primary subsystems:

1. The Command Router (cli layer)
2. The Resolution Pipeline (resolver layer)
3. The Execution Engine (engine layer)
4. The Storage & Caching Layer (cache layer)

1. The Command Router

When a user invokes a command (e.g., unirtm use node@20), the command router:

• Parses flags and arguments using cobra.
• Instantiates the application context.
• Validates the requested plugins against the remote registry.

2. The Resolution Pipeline

The hardest part of a tool manager is accurately resolving constraints (e.g., node@^20.1) against available remote versions. UniRTM uses a multi-stage resolution pipeline:

3. Execution Engine

UniRTM leverages Go's os/exec package to run tools natively. When you run a tool managed by UniRTM, the engine:

1. Calculates the exact PATH string required for the requested tools.
2. Clones the current environment variables.
3. Injects the new PATH and any .unirtm.toml variables into the clone.
4. Spawns the child process and pipes stdin, stdout, and stderr directly to the user's terminal without a middleman subshell.

This guarantees that signals (SIGINT, SIGTERM) are propagated correctly and terminal colors/TTY states are preserved.