Small IoT devices are inherently brittle to program due to lack of memory protection, limited resources, and only a thin layer of operating system support. A runtime memory access error will, at best, make your IoT device crash and reboot. We believe this makes them unattractive to programmers and therefore stifles IoT innovation.

We have designed Toit, a new software platform that turns IoT devices into ‘real’ robust computers: easy to program, safe execution environment, flexible, upgradable, and recoverable. This talk will first discuss why we had to implement a new programming language and then how Toit makes IoT devices accessible to high-level programmers. Finally, we will demonstrate how Toit can orchestrate a fleet of devices.

Lars Bak spent the last three decades designing and implementing object-oriented programming languages. His passion for this area started in 1986 when implementing a runtime system for BETA. Since then, Lars has left marks on several software systems: Self, Strongtalk, JVM HotSpot, JVM CLDC HI, OOVM Smalltalk, V8, and Dart, and lately Toit. In 2018, he received the Dahl-Nygaard prize for design and implementation of several object-oriented systems. Lars has a master’s degree in computer science at Aarhus University from 1988.