Toit programming language

This repository contains the Toit language implementation. It consists of the compiler, virtual machine, and standard libraries that together enable Toit programs to run on an ESP32.

Jaguar: Live reloading for the ESP32

You can use Toit to develop, update, and restart your ESP32 applications in less than two seconds through Jaguar. Jaguar is a small Toit program that runs on your ESP32. It uses the capabilities of the Toit virtual machine to let you update and restart your ESP32 applications written in Toit over WiFi whenever your source files change. Once set up, it is as easy as:

jag watch examples/hello.toit

Watch a short video that shows how you can experience Jaguar on your ESP32 in less than 3 minutes:

Community

Use this invite to join our Discord server, and follow the development and get help. We're eager to hear of your experience building with Toit.

We also use GitHub Discussions to discuss and learn and we follow a code of conduct in all our community interactions.

References

The Toit language is the foundation for the Toit platform that brings robust serviceability to your ESP32-based devices. You can read more about the language and the standard libraries in the platform documentation:

Contributing

We welcome and value your open source contributions to the language implementation and the broader ecosystem. Building or porting drivers to the Toit language is a great place to start. Read about how to get started building I2C-based drivers and get ready to publish your new driver to the package registry.

If you're interested in pitching in, we could use your help with these drivers and more!

Licenses

The Toit compiler, the virtual machine, and all the supporting infrastructure is licensed under the LGPL-2.1 license. The standard libraries contained in the lib/ directory are licensed under the MIT license. The examples contained in the examples/ directory are licensed under the 0BSD license.

Certain subdirectories are under their own open source licenses, detailed in those directories and the files they contain. These subdirectories are:

The subdirectory lib/font/matthew_welch/
Every subdirectory under packages/
Every subdirectory under lib/font/x11_100dpi/
Every subdirectory under src/compiler/third_party/
Every subdirectory under src/third_party/
Every subdirectory under third_party/

Installation

The instructions in this section don't cover the IDE integration. Follow the instructions below to set up Toit support for your editor.

Arch Linux

For Arch Linux (or variants such as Manjaro) use your favorite AUR helper to install the toit or toit-git package.

For example:

yay -S toit

Other platforms

We're actively working on simple installation steps for other platforms. For now, please use the build instructions below or download the .tar.gz files from the release page.

Building

Dependencies

Build system

To build Toit and its dependencies the build host requires:

If you are using a Linux distribution with apt capabilities, you can issue the following command to install these:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build golang

For builds targeting ESP32 hardware additional requirements might be in effect depending on the build host's architecture, see paragraph ESP32 tools.

For builds targeting RISC-V, ARM32, or ARM64 hardware, see the Other platforms README.

ESP-IDF

The Toit VM has a requirement for the Espressif IoT Development Framework, both for Linux and ESP32 builds (for Linux it's for the Mbed TLS implementation).

We recommend you use Toitware's ESP-IDF fork that comes with a few changes:

Custom malloc implementation.
Allocation-fixes for UART, etc.
LWIP fixes.

The fork's repository has been added as a submodule reference to this repository, so doing a recursive submodule init & update will establish everything nedded:

git submodule update --init --recursive

For the build to succeed, you will need to add its path to your ENV as IDF_PATH:

export IDF_PATH=`pwd`/third_party/esp-idf

To use the offical ESP-IDF, or any other variation, make sure it is available in your file system and point IDF_PATH to its path instead before building.

ESP32 tools

Install the ESP32 tools, if you want to build an image for an ESP32.

On Linux:

$IDF_PATH/install.sh

For other platforms, see Espressif's documentation.

Remember to update your environment variables:

. $IDF_PATH/export.sh

Build for host machine

Make sure IDF_PATH is set, and the required build tools are installed as described in dependency sections ESP-IDF and Build system above.

Then run the following commands at the root of your checkout.

make tools

NOTE

These instructions have been tested on Linux and macOS.

Windows support is still preliminary, and the build instructions may differ for Windows. Let us know on the discussions forum how we can improve this README.

This builds the Toit VM, the compiler, the language server and the package manager.

You should then be able to execute a toit file:

build/host/sdk/bin/toitvm examples/hello.toit

The package manager is found at build/host/sdk/bin/toitpkg:

build/host/sdk/bin/toitpkg pkg init --project-root=<some-directory>
build/host/sdk/bin/toitpkg pkg install --project-root=<some-directory> <package-id>

IDE integration

Toit has a VS Code extension. You can either use the published extension or build it yourself from the sources.

In the VS Code extension (version 1.3.7+) set the toitLanguageServer.command setting to ["PATH_TO_SDK/bin/toitlsp", "--toitc=PATH_TO_SDK/bin/toitc"], where PATH_TO_SDK is the path to your build/host/sdk/ folder in the Toit repository.

This makes the extension use the language server that was compiled in the build step.

Other IDEs

The Toit language server is independent of VSCode and can be used with other IDEs. It can be started with:

build/host/sdk/bin/toitlsp --toitc=build/host/sdk/bin/toitc

See the instructions of your IDE on how to integrate the language server.

There are syntax highlighters for VIM and CodeMirror in the ide-tools repository.

Build for ESP32

Make sure the environment variables for the ESP32 tools are set, as described in the dependencies section.

Build an image for your ESP32 device that can be flashed using esptool.py.

make esp32

By default, the image boots up and runs examples/hello.toit. You can use your own entry point and specify it through the ESP32_ENTRY make variable:

make esp32 ESP32_ENTRY=examples/mandelbrot.toit

Build an image and flash it to your ESP32 device. You must specify the device port with the ESP32_PORT make variable. You can also use all the make esp32 make variables.

make flash ESP32_ENTRY=examples/mandelbrot.toit ESP32_PORT=/dev/ttyUSB0

Configuring WiFi for the ESP32

You can easily configure the ESP32's builtin WiFi by setting the ESP32_WIFI_SSID and ESP32_WIFI_PASSWORD make variables:

make esp32 ESP32_ENTRY=examples/http.toit ESP32_WIFI_SSID=myssid ESP32_WIFI_PASSWORD=mypassword

This allows the WiFi to automatically start up when a network interface is opened.

mwl / toit