>In February 2019, the company raised DKK 23 million (approximately US$3.5 million) in seed funding from Swedish venture capital firm Creandum.[4] Early versions required cloud registration to deploy code to devices.[5]
> The commercial cloud offering was later discontinued. Development of fleet-management tooling continued through an open-source project called Artemis, built on Supabase and PostgreSQL, which users self-host.[8]
> According to Denmark's Central Business Register, Toitware ApS ceased operating in 2024.[9] Development of the language continues as a community project on GitHub.
Seems unlikely to be a bait and switch at this point
Toit is a language for writing scripts on your computer and applications on your ESP32. A readable syntax, an efficient runtime, and tools that work together.
Free and open source. Maintained by volunteers.
Think of it as a runtime + scheduler that you deploy programs to ESP32 devices. It gives you the ability to run multiple programs simultaneously (with isolation) and remote updates. The language compiles to bytecode; the developers have lots of experience writing VMs for constrained devices; see https://www.theregister.com/software/2004/07/27/forgotten-la... for something that predates V8 and Dart.
We looked at these when we started. The problem with them is that they weren't designed with constrained resources in mind and it shows. For example, objects are hash tables and method calls are thus expensive. An obligatory top level execution makes startup slow, ...
If you have a bigger machine you can optimize some of this (V8), but these optimizations typically need memory and/or a JIT. (And Python struggles to optimize even on stronger machines).
By starting from scratch (with what we learned from V8 and Dart) you can design something that feels similar but is much cleaner and faster to run.
Very happy to hear that! I don't work in embedded but really like the language design of Toit. Hope it'll get a second chance, it feels like it flew under the radar a bit when it came out.
They should write this prominently on their website. It doesn’t radiate trustworthiness/substance/reputation. Also performance and resource requirements should be prominent when targets are MCUs.
Yeah, but Lars Bak isn't exactly a nobody when it comes to computer science either. Although I guess Bak is more famous for the implementation of programming languages than their design.
Aside: funny how Dart and TS both have Danish creators.
I may be misremembering, but my recollection is that Dart was written off in large part because of Google. Distrust with them was already high as they were abusing their dominance with things like AMP, and people felt it was a bad idea to give them even more control over the web.
This seems very interesting. It almost looks/feels like Pythonic Go.
There's already another syntax example in the thread, but I want to point out the weirdest syntax I've seen yet: positional arguments look like posix command arguments:
greet name/string="World" --greeting/string="Hello" -> string:
return "$greeting $name"
main:
print (greet) // Prints Hello World.
print (greet "Ada" --greeting="Hi") // Prints Hi Ada.
Feedback for the doc writers on this then, the phrase in my head of "the name of the named argument is greeting, name is not named" is a little awkward.
I have used toit in a lot of my projects. It is a really nice language and so much cleaner than all the alternatives I have tried (Arduino, Python, Lua).
The tools just work and I got used to the language really quickly.
I did hate that it was bytecode. It just felt wrong to run bytecode on an ESP32. OTOH it just works, and I have never noticed any performance problems.
My latest project is a controller for a slave-clock: https://gitlab.com/close2/nebenuhr-toit
(There is also a Garmin repository that allows me to control the clock using my Garmin watch.)
Full disclosure: I had to use toit (floitsch is my brother), but it really is a nice language and development environment.
I think "toy language" isn't really fair. Toit has been developed for 7 years, some of which with multiple engineers working on it full time. (The blog post says 4 years, but that's just for the v2.0.0 development).
Toit doesn't have a lot of users, but it is used in production (for example by Consibio) and is definitely developed for production environments.
Is there some kind of an advertising blurb for why you’d want to use Toit, especially for scripting? I think the only thing I saw was “a readable language”, but I’d probably consider Python more readable than it judging from the examples.
The wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toit is short but still gives a lot of context.
Just a joking side note: switch n to t in the URL and you get article for food in Estonian: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toit
>In February 2019, the company raised DKK 23 million (approximately US$3.5 million) in seed funding from Swedish venture capital firm Creandum.[4] Early versions required cloud registration to deploy code to devices.[5]
DNS blackhole the domain and run.
> The commercial cloud offering was later discontinued. Development of fleet-management tooling continued through an open-source project called Artemis, built on Supabase and PostgreSQL, which users self-host.[8]
> According to Denmark's Central Business Register, Toitware ApS ceased operating in 2024.[9] Development of the language continues as a community project on GitHub.
Seems unlikely to be a bait and switch at this point
whoops, black and white thinking burns me once more.
Even after reading that (and more of the homepage) I have no idea what this is.
Think of it as a runtime + scheduler that you deploy programs to ESP32 devices. It gives you the ability to run multiple programs simultaneously (with isolation) and remote updates. The language compiles to bytecode; the developers have lots of experience writing VMs for constrained devices; see https://www.theregister.com/software/2004/07/27/forgotten-la... for something that predates V8 and Dart.
You get almost all of that with the more common language options too (MicroPython, NodeMCU/Lua, Espruino/JS). What makes this custom language better?
We looked at these when we started. The problem with them is that they weren't designed with constrained resources in mind and it shows. For example, objects are hash tables and method calls are thus expensive. An obligatory top level execution makes startup slow, ...
If you have a bigger machine you can optimize some of this (V8), but these optimizations typically need memory and/or a JIT. (And Python struggles to optimize even on stronger machines).
By starting from scratch (with what we learned from V8 and Dart) you can design something that feels similar but is much cleaner and faster to run.
Tangent: what an appropriate username :)
Here's a beginner tutorial for the language: https://docs.toit.io/language/toitversus
Nice syntax. It looks like how we'd design programming if C had never existed.
The people behind Toit are the original people behind the V8 VM in Chrome. They know their stuff.
Those were it's creators, are they still involved after the company folded?
Because if not, that might explain the lack of marketing around it.
Kasper and I are still working on it.
Very happy to hear that! I don't work in embedded but really like the language design of Toit. Hope it'll get a second chance, it feels like it flew under the radar a bit when it came out.
They should write this prominently on their website. It doesn’t radiate trustworthiness/substance/reputation. Also performance and resource requirements should be prominent when targets are MCUs.
Also co-founding Dart. They definitely know their stuff.
Dart v1.0, they had nothing to do with Dart v2.0, and the change in language semantics was the main reason folks like Gilad Bracha left the team.
Dart should have enjoyed the popularity that TypeScript received. Tough to compete with Hejlsberg though.
Yeah, but Lars Bak isn't exactly a nobody when it comes to computer science either. Although I guess Bak is more famous for the implementation of programming languages than their design.
Aside: funny how Dart and TS both have Danish creators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)
Google politics, Dart is only around thanks to AdWords team, and Flutter.
Jetpack Compose was created by Android team exactly as counter reaction to Flutter.
Go got lucky with their internal advocacy, and the push to rewrite Kubernetes from Java into Go.
Google isn't exactly known for great programming language design, contrary to runtime implementations.
I may be misremembering, but my recollection is that Dart was written off in large part because of Google. Distrust with them was already high as they were abusing their dominance with things like AMP, and people felt it was a bad idea to give them even more control over the web.
This seems very interesting. It almost looks/feels like Pythonic Go.
There's already another syntax example in the thread, but I want to point out the weirdest syntax I've seen yet: positional arguments look like posix command arguments:
Arguments like --greeting are the named arguments:
https://docs.toit.io/language/beginner/lists-and-functions/#...
The name argument is positional here.
Feedback for the doc writers on this then, the phrase in my head of "the name of the named argument is greeting, name is not named" is a little awkward.
I have used toit in a lot of my projects. It is a really nice language and so much cleaner than all the alternatives I have tried (Arduino, Python, Lua).
The tools just work and I got used to the language really quickly.
I did hate that it was bytecode. It just felt wrong to run bytecode on an ESP32. OTOH it just works, and I have never noticed any performance problems.
My latest project is a controller for a slave-clock: https://gitlab.com/close2/nebenuhr-toit (There is also a Garmin repository that allows me to control the clock using my Garmin watch.)
Full disclosure: I had to use toit (floitsch is my brother), but it really is a nice language and development environment.
[Edit: typos..]
I just started working on a compile-to-native approach you might appreciate :)
Looks interesting! I can't tell really from the docs the untended use case though. It says "scripts", but also " applications".
Most importantly though (/s), is this toit as in "roof" in French, toit as in "to it", or otherwise?
It's from Austin Powers.
"toit like a tiger"
https://youtu.be/gu31VyXlTzo
Ahaha! I'd been thinking it was pronounced as in French (a bit like "twah") when I should be saying it in Mike Myer's super authentic Dutch accent!
now we're talking.
Looks quite nice
Who is using this? The company originally behind it has shut down
No one, it's just a toy language
I think "toy language" isn't really fair. Toit has been developed for 7 years, some of which with multiple engineers working on it full time. (The blog post says 4 years, but that's just for the v2.0.0 development).
Toit doesn't have a lot of users, but it is used in production (for example by Consibio) and is definitely developed for production environments.
Is there some kind of an advertising blurb for why you’d want to use Toit, especially for scripting? I think the only thing I saw was “a readable language”, but I’d probably consider Python more readable than it judging from the examples.
Good luck running (micro)python on an ESP32.
Lua exists :)
The last thing this planet needs a new programming language