What does HackerNews think of tl?

Now I like lua and think single pass is the way to go for interpreted, since you don't have the disadvantage of a slow compile time no matter how big your codebase gets, BUT its not great to write in. some things are (apparently) not possible, which means the only solution is to transpile into it, which has led to some good languages like moonscript[0], and the dynamic nature is a boon as your codebase grows, which has led to teal[1] which offers static type checking.

[0]: https://moonscript.org/

[1]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl

For those interested in using Lua or a similar syntax I curated a list of typed Lua-related projects:

- https://luau-lang.org (Lua derivative, interpreted / sandboxed, from Roblox)

- https://terralang.org (Lua JIT compiler)

- https://nelua.io (Lua-syntax -> C compiler (WASM too w/ Emscripten)

- https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene (Lua AOT compiler)

- https://github.com/teal-language/tl (Teal -> Lua compiler)

- https://typescripttolua.github.io/ (TS -> Lua compiler)

- https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server (IDE only typing)

With minimum effort you can get a lot of benefit from using Sumneko's Lua language server in VSCode for near many Lua versions (LuaJIT, PUC-Rio Lua, etc.)

All of the projects serve different purposes, whether you need/love Lua for speed (JIT, for games), low memory usage (AOT, for embedded), or simplicity (all of them).

Teal is great for this - statically typed and compiles down to lua. I’ve even integrated it into other languages because teal is written in teal (compiling down to lua, which can be run on lots of different devices!)

https://github.com/teal-language/tl