Let me tell you what's under the hood. OpenClaw is % TypeScript by line count. All layers (Gateway, Channel, LLM) run on Node.js +. The mobile apps are native: Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android.
For storage, the project takes a local-first approach. Your entire memory system lives in a single .sqlite file, with sqlite-vec for vector search and FTS5 for keyword search. No PostgreSQL, no Redis. Docker handles deployment. A basic setup only needs Node.js and a single Docker Compose file. I'll walk you through the full setup in the next section.