2.7 Gall

Note: This guide is outdated. For an updated explanation of Gall, take a look at /tutorial/arvo/gall

Gall is the Arvo vane responsible for handling user space applications. When writing a Gall application there are several things you will need to understand.

bowl and moves

The core of a gall app is a door which has two parts of its subject, the first a bowl:gall which contains a lot of standard things used by gall apps, the second a type containing app state information.

Vanes in Arvo communicate by means of moves. When a move is produced by an arm in a gall app, it's dispatched by Arvo to the correct handler for the request, be it another application or another vane. A move is pair of bone and card. These are essential components to understand when learning to use gall.

A bone is an opaque cause that initiates a request. When constructing a move you can often use ost.bowl and when responding to an incoming move you can use the bone in that move to construct your response.

A card is the effect or event that is being requested. Each application should define the set of cards it can produce. Here is an excerpt from clock.hoon showing its cards

+$  card
  $%  [%poke wire dock poke]
      [%http-response =http-event:http]
      [%connect wire binding:eyre term]
      [%diff %json json]

Each card is a pair of a tag and a noun. The tag indicates what the event being triggered is and the noun is any data required for that event.


Gall applications can have a number of arms that get called depending on the information they are sent.


++prep is the arm that is called when an application is first started or when it's updated. This arm should be a gate that takes a unit of a noun and provides a way, if necessary, to make any changes to the application's data required by an upgrade. As a reminder, a unit is a type that may contain another type or it might contain ~. They are used when there may or may not be some data available.

Often when developing an application you will not initially care about the data. Here is a sample ++prep arm that will simply throw away the previous application state.

++  prep
    |=  a=(unit *)
    `(quip move _+>.$)`[~ +>.$]


++poke is one of the primary arms used when building a Gall application. A poke is often a request to perform some operation that the application was designed for. These are requests from outside the application. ++poke will get called with the raw noun data which can then be inspected to perform the requested actions with.

Many arms, ++poke included, have variants that end in the name of a mark e.g. ++poke-noun. Which one gets called will be based on which mark was used to create the poke. Gall will attempt to use the most specific arm it can find, eventually falling back to ++poke if no matching mark arm is found. Use of these mark arms, however, is now discouraged.


++coup is a response handler for any pokes our application sent out.


++peer is used to handle subscriptions. When something subscribes to your application this arm will run. The something could be another Gall application on your ship or another ship or a tile from landscape or anything else that is able to communicate with Gall. Your outgoing subscriptions will not be tracked automatically but incoming ones will live in sup.bowl so that you can send information to them when required.


++pull is run when someone unsubscribes from your application, this is used to run any changes needed for your application when they unsubscribed. Their removal from sup.bowl is handled for you.


++quit gets called when a subscription is dropped. Often you will just want to resubscribe when this happens.


++reap is to ++peer as ++coup is to ++poke, that is to say it's the arm that gets run in acknowledgment of outgoing subscription requests.


++diff gets called when an application you are subscribed to has an update. It could either be an entirely new set of data for that application or an update to existing data.


++sigh gets called when Eyre has a response to an http request made by our application.

Let's take a look in the next section at an example Gall app.