Draft:Toit

Founding

Lars Bak and colleagues founded Toitware ApS in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2017–2018 to build a new programming language for IoT development.^[3] In February 2019, the company raised DKK 23 million (approximately $3.5 million USD) in seed funding from Swedish venture capital firm Creandum.^[4] Early versions required cloud registration to deploy code to devices.^[5]

Open sourcing

In November 2021, Toitware announced the language would be released as open source under the LGPL licence.^[6] At the same time, Espressif Systems — the manufacturer of the ESP32 — published coverage of Toit on its own news platform, noting performance comparisons with MicroPython on ESP32 hardware.^[7] CNX Software, an independent embedded-systems publication, also covered the release, reporting Toitware's claim that Toit ran approximately 30 times faster than MicroPython on the ESP32.^[8]

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.^[9]

According to Denmark's Central Business Register, Toitware ApS ceased operating in 2024.^[10] Development of the language continues as a community project on GitHub.

Name and logo

The name "Toit" comes from a running gag in the 2002 film Austin Powers in Goldmember, in which the character Johann van der Smut repeatedly says "toit like a tiger" in an exaggerated Dutch accent. The Toit logo is styled after a feline nose, referencing the same phrase.

Hello World

main:
  print "Hello, World!"

Functions and calls

Functions are declared with a name, parameters, and a colon. Arguments are passed by juxtaposition, without parentheses or commas, similar to Smalltalk and Unix shell syntax.

print-hello name:       // Function 'print-hello' with one parameter.
  print "hello $name"

main:
  print-hello "Austin"  // Call with one argument.

Classes

class Foo:
  some-method:
    print "in some-method"

class Bar extends Foo:
  constructor:
    print "in constructor"

  bar-method with params:
    print "in bar-method"

Virtual machine

Toit programs compile to bytecode and run on a purpose-built lightweight virtual machine (VM). The same VM runs on both microcontrollers and desktop systems. On desktop, the VM and bytecode can be bundled into a single self-contained executable.^[12]

Containers

On the ESP32, the Toit VM can run multiple programs simultaneously. These are called "containers". Each container runs independently, with no shared memory, and containers communicate via a built-in remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism.^[13]

Concurrency

Within a container, programs use cooperative concurrency through a "tasks" abstraction. Tasks are not preempted arbitrarily; they yield at explicit yield statements or when waiting on hardware or system calls.