GIO is a library, designed to present programmers with a modern and usable interface to a virtual file system. It allows applications to access local and remote files with a single consistent API, which was designed "to overcome the shortcomings of GnomeVFS" and be "so good that developers prefer it over raw POSIX calls."GIO serves as low-level system library for the GNOME Shell/GNOME/GTK+ software stack and is being developed by The GNOME Project.