Components are the foundational building blocks of software running in Fuchsia. Each component is a composable, sandboxed module that interacts with other components through capabilities. This promotes system security and creates clear interfaces between individual components, making them easier to update or replace.
In Fuchsia, everything is a component (almost). Recall from the previous discussion of Zircon that the surface area of the kernel is intentionally small, with most core services being implemented in user space. This means that most software running on Fuchsia is implemented using the component framework, including:
Outside the kernel there are only a few low-level exceptions not using the component framework, such as bootloaders and the userboot process.
