Clay is the primary filesystem for the Arvo operating system, which is the core of an urbit. The architecture of Clay is intrinsically connected with Arvo, but for this section we assume no knowledge of either Arvo or Urbit. We will point out only those features of Arvo that are necessary for an understanding of Clay, and we will do so only when they arise.
The first relevant feature of Arvo is that it is a deterministic system where input and output are defined as a series of events and effects. The state of Arvo is simply a pure function of its event log. None of the effects from an event are emitted until the event is entered in the log and persisted, either to disk or another trusted source of persistence, such as a Kafka cluster. Consequently, Arvo is a single-level store: everything in its state is persistent.
In a more traditional OS, everything in RAM can be erased at any time by power failure, and is always erased on reboot. Thus, a primary purpose of a filesystem is to ensure files persist across power failures and reboots. In Arvo, both power failures and reboots are special cases of suspending computation, which is done safely since our event log is already persistent. Therefore, Clay is not needed in Arvo for persistence. Why, then, do we have a filesystem? There are two answers to this question.
First, Clay provides a filesystem tree, which is a convenient user interface for some applications. Unix has the useful concept of virtual filesystems, which are used for everything from direct access to devices, to random number generators, to the /proc tree. It is easy and intuitive to read from and write to a filesystem tree.
Second, Clay has a distributed revision-control system baked into it. Traditional filesystems are not revision controlled, so userspace software -- such as git -- is written on top of them to do so. Clay natively provides the same functionality as modern DVCSes, and more.
Clay has two other unique properties that we'll cover later on: it supports typed data and is referentially transparent.
Revision Control
Every urbit has one or more desks, which are independently revision-controlled branches. Each desk contains its own mark definitions, apps, and so forth.
Traditionally, an Urbit ship has at least a %base desk, and usually a %landscape desk, among others. The %base desk has the kernel and base system software. The %landscape desk has software pertaining to the home screen. The %base desk is a fork of the %base desk of whichever ship you download system updates from - typically your sponsor, but theoretically may be any ship.
A desk is a series of numbered commits, the most recent of which represents the current state of the desk. A commit is composed of (1) an absolute time when it was created, (2) a list of zero or more parents, and (3) a map from paths to data.
Most commits have exactly one parent, but the initial commit on a desk may have zero parents, and merge commits have more than one parent.
The non-metadata is stored as a map of paths to data. It's worth noting that no constraints are put on this map, so, for example, both /a/b and /a/b/c could have data. This is impossible in a traditional Unix filesystem since it means that /a/b is both a file and a directory. Conventionally, the final element in the path is its mark -- much like a filename extension in Unix. Thus, /doc/readme.md in Unix is stored as /doc/readme/md in urbit.
The data is not stored directly in the map; rather, a hash of the data is stored, and we maintain a master blob store. Thus, if the same data is referred to in multiple commits (as, for example, when a file doesn't change between commits), only the hash is duplicated.
In the master blob store, we either store the data directly, or else we store a diff against another blob. The hash is dependent only on the data within and not on whether or not it's stored directly, so we may on occasion rearrange the contents of the blob store for performance reasons.
Recall that a desk is a series of numbered commits. Not every commit in a desk must be numbered. For example, if the %base desk has had 50 commits since %foo was forked from it, then a merge from %base to %foo will only add a single revision number, although the full commit history will be accessible by traversing the parentage of the individual commits.
We do guarantee that the first commit is numbered 1, commits are numbered consecutively after that (i.e. there are no "holes"), the topmost commit is always numbered, and every numbered commit is an ancestor of every later numbered commit.
There are three ways to refer to particular commits in the revision history. Firstly, one can use the revision number. Secondly, one can use any absolute time between the one numbered commit and the next (inclusive of the first, exclusive of the second). Thirdly, every desk has a map of labels to revision numbers. These labels may be used to refer to specific commits.
Additionally, Clay is a global filesystem, so data on other urbits is easily accessible the same way as data on our local urbit. In general, the path to a particular revision of a desk is /~urbit-name/desk-name/revision. Thus, to get /try/readme/md from revision 5 of the %base desk on ~sampel-sipnym, we refer to /~sampel-sipnym/base/5/try/readme/md. Clay's namespace is thus global and referentially transparent.
A Typed Filesystem
Since Clay is a general filesystem for storing data of arbitrary types, in order to revision control correctly it needs to be aware of types all the way through. Traditional revision control does an excellent job of handling source code, so for source code we act very similar to traditional revision control. The challenge is to handle other data similarly well.
For example, modern VCSs generally support "binary files", which are files for which the standard textual diffing, patching, and merging algorithms are not helpful. A "diff" of two binary files is just a pair of the files, "patching" this diff is just replacing the old file with the new one, and "merging" non-identical diffs is always a conflict, which can't even be helpfully annotated. Without knowing anything about the structure of a blob of data, this is the best we can do.
Often, though, "binary" files have some internal structure, and it is possible to create diff, patch, and merge algorithms that take advantage of this structure. An image may be the result of a base image with some set of operations applied. With algorithms aware of this set of operations, not only can revision control software save space by not having to save every revision of the image individually, these transformations can be made on parallel branches and merged at will.
Suppose Alice is tasked with touching up a picture, improving the color balance, adjusting the contrast, and so forth, while Bob has the job of cropping the picture to fit where it's needed and adding textual overlay. Without type-aware revision control, these changes must be made serially, requiring Alice and Bob to explicitly coordinate their efforts. With type-aware revision control, these operations may be performed in parallel, and then the two changesets can be merged programmatically.
Of course, even some kinds of text files may be better served by diff, patch, and merge algorithms aware of the structure of the files. Consider a file containing a pretty-printed JSON object. Small changes in the JSON object may result in rather significant changes in how the object is pretty-printed (for example, by addding an indentation level, splitting a single line into multiple lines).
A text file wrapped at 80 columns also reacts suboptimally with unadorned Hunt-McIlroy diffs. A single word inserted in a paragraph may push the final word or two of the line onto the next line, and the entire rest of the paragraph may be flagged as a change. Two diffs consisting of a single added word to different sentences may be flagged as a conflict. In general, prose should be diffed by sentence, not by line.
As far as we are aware, Clay is the first generalized, type-aware revision control system. We'll go into the workings of this system in some detail.
Marks
Central to a typed filesystem is the idea of file types. In Clay, we call these marks. See the Marks section for more details.