Overview
Substrate Runtime
The runtime contains the business logic that will define your blockchain's behavior, a.k.a. its state transition function. The runtime will define the storage items and functions that users can dispatch.
Substrate provides a set of modules, called pallets, that can be composed and configured. Substrate also provides the support libraries necessary to let these pallets interact with the client. Each pallet contains domain-specific logic and storage items. At the runtime level, you can add your own pallets by using the standard pallet interfaces and access the public methods and traits of other pallets.
The entire set of pallets and support libraries is called FRAME. FRAME interacts with the client by implementing the traits in primitives.
For example, if you want to add smart contract functionality to your blockchain, you simply need to include the Contracts pallet. Adding this pallet will expose the smart contract interface so that users can deploy smart contracts that execute in Wasm.
Because Substrate can execute a runtime in both native and Wasm, anything that you write in FRAME can be upgraded without a hard fork.