kasperl

There are ways and we've seen successful integration of C++ libraries and functionality - but it is not what I would call easy yet.

Toit is evolving rapidly and we find that being fully open source helps our users tweak things where necessary. It's been a fun ride so far and we've got some pretty awesome and sophisticated use cases that involve custom C++ code.

That's a fair and valid point. I firmly believe that live reloading of individual apps on your ESP32 during development is a big win for productivity, but clearly so is an established and mature ecosystem.

I also really like MicroPython! Having said that, I have been working on an alternative to it for a number of years now -- primarily to provide a more robust and performant high-level alternative to C and Rust on the ESP32-family of chips:

https://github.com/toitlang/toit

I'd love to pick your brain and fully understand your experience with MicroPython. I've been doing programming languages for a number of years now, and I find that it is incredibly useful to understand what developers appreciate (and dislike) about the available stacks.

Thank you! I'll try to get that updated.

Thank you for the mention!

I have been working on the Toit language for the ESP32 for a number of years now -- and it has been an enjoyable challenge to build an open source stack capable of supporting live reloading on a micro-controller that can run for years on batteries.

https://github.com/toitlang/toit

I find it strangely mesmerizing to watch sorting algorithms do their thing. Thanks for having fun!

Fix for the UTF-8 issue on Windows is in the works: https://github.com/toitlang/toit/pull/1318.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention :)

When we wrote the initial version of V8, it was reasonably small :)

No V8? The website explicitly says that Blueboat combines Google's state-of-the-art V8 JavaScript engine, process-level snapshots, and Rust to speed up everything from cold start to runtime performance.

Author here. We have been working on enabling modern, high-level software architectures on micro-controllers for some time now and we're at a point where we feel like the bits we've built could use some scrutiny and feedback from the wider community. It is all open-source and it is ready for you to try out.

If you're interested in building software for embedded devices, but turned off by having to do everything in low-level C code running in a kernel context, we're definitely interested in working with you to build an alternative. A high-level, robust alternative that makes it easier to build quality services for the internet of things powered by micro-controllers like the ESP32.

It is worth noticing that you enable and disable the serviceability for individual devices when you want to. Your unserviced devices are free and keep running your code.

https://toit.io/pricing

Oh, and full disclosure: I'm the author of the blog post.

Among other things, Toit uses the selector-based row displacement technique for building a compact method dispatch table that can be queried in constant time.

If you're into fast virtual method calls - also for dynamic languages - you might want to take a look at Karel Driesen's excellent PhD dissertation on the subject:

https://cs.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/documents/1999-24.ps

[Co-author of 'Revolutionizing Embedded Software' -- the linked thesis with the ... not so understated title -- and co-founder of Toit here.]

Yeah, there certainly is overlap in some of the core ideas, but the scene has really changed with the development of general-purpose microcontrollers like the ESP32 that can run for years on standard batteries and still pack a punch (it's a dual core 240MHz CPU). Also, the global connectivity options like NB-IoT and LTE-M allow devices to connect directly to the internet, which enables us to make them fully serviceable through a cloud-hosted API.

Don't worry; strong mode will be the only mode going forward and it already is the only mode for Flutter. Not merely optional.

Flutter (http://flutter.io) strikes an interesting balance here by (1) allowing just-in-time compiled, state-preserving "hot-reloading" during interactive development and (2) supporting optimized deployment using classical ahead-of-time compilation to native code.

Disclaimer: I work on the team at Google that builds the underlying language platform for Flutter.

... and Dart is the runner up in terms of gaining popularity in 2016 according to TIOBE.

There's a short interview with the author of StageXL, Bernhard Pichler, here: http://news.dartlang.org/2016/12/stagexl-10-chat-with-bernha....

Very active development; see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsILKY-A1kq4e... for a few recent presentations about the progress.

(disclaimer: I work on the Dart team at Google)