Frequently Asked Questions

General

Q: Is Toka production-ready?

Toka is currently in beta (v0.9.8-03). It's suitable for personal projects, prototyping, and experimentation. The 1.0 release is planned with a focus on production stability.

Q: What platforms does Toka support?

Linux, macOS, and Windows are supported. The LLVM backend provides cross-compilation capabilities.

Q: Is there a package manager?

Toka has a built-in package manager via toka add. Official library registry at pkg.tokalang.dev.

Language Design

Q: How is Toka different from Rust?

Toka achieves memory safety through the Hat Principle instead of a borrow checker. This means no lifetime annotations — just simple hat (^) tokens that make ownership visible in the syntax.

Q: Does Toka have a garbage collector?

No. Memory is managed at compile time through the PAL Checker. There is no runtime GC overhead.

Q: Is Toka compatible with C libraries?

Yes. Toka has native C interop without FFI overhead. You can call C functions directly.

Learning

Q: Do I need to know C or Rust to learn Toka?

Not at all. Toka's syntax is clean and Go-like. If you know any programming language, you can learn Toka in a weekend.

Q: Where can I find more examples?

Check out the examples/ directory in the Toka repository and the tokalibs collection of community libraries.

Q: Is there a community or forum?

Join the Toka community on GitHub Discussions at github.com/tokalang/toka.

Technical

Q: How fast is Toka?

Toka compiles at approximately 80,000 lines of code per second (Clang backend) and produces optimized native binaries via LLVM 20. Performance is comparable to C for equivalent code.

Q: How large are Toka binaries?

A minimal HTTP server binary is approximately 250 KB — no runtime, no VM, just native code.

Q: Does Toka support multithreading?

Yes. Toka provides tasks, MPSC channels, atomic operations, and mutexes for concurrent programming.