Processes serve as the "backend" of your application in AO. Developers can choose their preferred VM for execution, with the reference implementation focusing on WASM. AO currently offers a Lua runtime environment that compiles to WASM, making it easier to develop and execute processes within the network.
The easiest way to understand processes is to use aos, which you can treat as interactive shell for processes.
You can find installation method and examples of aos in:
https://cookbook_ao.g8way.io/guides/aos/index.html
First let’s spawn a new process using aos (called Alice)
The pid (process id) is: P-gNAVCjXEJNGnl2mzMSI5-YEprIdJO-fFRf64DVnwo
Let’s check it again with ao.id :
Ok, seems all right. Let’s copy this id to ao.link
ao.link tells us that it’s a process, who’s owner is TRzR12gI...Yz_j_kZM (My wallet address).
Using module ffvkmPM1...kDNqsKNw which is the precompiled standard module containing basic Lua modules for process to import.
When we type down the “ao.id” command line, a message will be generated and signed by your wallet and send to this process. We can check it in this link: