[yebyen]

The IO are events, and the events come from unix (for example: signals, files and sockets).

Urbit is not meant to replace Unix. "They call us, we don't call them" is the fundamental precept in play here. I assure you there is I/O in Urbit, the vanes include an HTTP server, a Hoon-interpreting shell which accepts keyboard input from a terminal, and a UDP layer for facilitating ship-to-ship communications. All of that is written in Hoon, which compiles into Nock.

[clarkm]

> Urbit is not meant to replace Unix.

But I thought that was the long-term master plan. Isn't the whole point to extricate ourselves from eternal dependence on C and Unix ecosystem?

[yebyen]

Some long term plans are crazier than others. I would like to have a machine that runs nock directly on the bare metal, but that doesn't mean it fits into the current architecture.

So far to my knowledge everyone running Urbit is doing so on a Unix system of one flavor or another. The point of "they call us, we don't call them" is not that Urbit never calls into Unix, it's that the set of reasons to reach out to Unix for one of the existing OS facilities is limited, restricted from the list growing any longer than absolutely necessary.

If your persisting disk filesystem evaporates from under you in the middle of operation, maybe Urbit can be prepared to deal with this, but as long as you have it there, might as well use it to allow the user to muck around with your internal representations in a way that is already familiar.

One of the problems Urbit doesn't currently seek to tackle is "a new text editor." Surely this is for the best, not because "a new text editor" is not an interesting problem, but for reasons that I think are already obvious to you.

[perlgeek]

Does that mean the IO events are part of the t-shirt sized spec?

[yebyen]

The keyboard HID drivers are not.

The terminal (dill), HTTP server (eyre), socket UDP layer (ames), and shell (batz) are really expressed using the language in the spec. The filesystem (clay) has a reflection in your unix filesystem, but it's also really clay. In a very real way, even if they are not fully expressed by the Nock spec, they are built using the primitives that are entirely laid out there in Nock 5K. Hoon compiles to nock.

I feel like I'm trying to argue against "no true scotsman" but I don't know how else I'm going to convince you that the code "is really from mars," which seems to be what I want to tell you whether or not it's what you're really asking here.

[javaexpert101]

Strictly speaking, this isn't true. All of these components have code in the C/unix layer.