>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.
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.
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.
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.
DNS blackhole the domain and run.
> 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
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.
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:
https://docs.toit.io/language/beginner/lists-and-functions/#...
The name argument is positional here.
Nice syntax. It looks like how we'd design programming if C had never existed.
Because if not, that might explain the lack of marketing around it.
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)
Most importantly though (/s), is this toit as in "roof" in French, toit as in "to it", or otherwise?
"toit like a tiger"
https://youtu.be/gu31VyXlTzo
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.