IntelliJ-Luanalysis VS tl

Because of compile-time type safety / static analysis. And I say this as the author of an IDE that bolts those features onto Lua: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

I want to start adding support for Lua derivatives to my IDE (which adds static type checking to Lua - inference, structural & nominal types, generics etc. (Luanalysis - https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis/)

I feel like plugin support would be best but I've no idea how that's supposed to work in the presence of a predefined grammar. There's also so many variants I don't think there's a good way to build composite grammar.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to extend language parsing? For reference, I'm using https://github.com/JetBrains/Grammar-Kit.

There's also my IDE which just bolts on types (both structural and nominal) to regular Lua - no transpiling as the types are defined with comments (or inferred).

https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis/

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to give it as much attention as it deserves recently.

What do you mean by no lambdas exactly? Lua supports anonymous functions and those functions capture variables from their outer scope.

I use functional programming extensively in Lua also. Could you elaborate on what it doesn't permit?

Integers were introduced in 5.3.

Assigning operators? It has metatables, you can absolutely implement your own operators.

If you want static typing you can use my IDE: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis/

Granted, my IDE is incredibly opinionated and not for everyone.

Also, Lua is not my favourite language to use, doesn't even make top 3. However, the robustness of its design, considering its simplicity, is incredibly elegant.

Anyway, you can find screenshots in the project's README on Github: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (Post-Covid)

Technologies: Kubernetes, AWS, TypeScript, Ruby, React. Polyglot, refer to résumé.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VJk9gs1-LN3e333ZDICwkG5pgTb...

Email: [email protected]

Github: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamindobell/

Current Role: CTO @ Snaploader

Salary Expectation: $200,000+ USD

These days I describe myself as a full-stack developer, but I’ve also plenty of professional experience with mobile (native + React Native), infrastructure, ops, game development, tooling and reverse engineering. In my free time I also tinker with embedded systems. I’m an avid open source contributor, but also maintain many of my own open-source projects e.g. a Lua IDE which statically type checks Lua (https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis).

I’ve 12+ years of development experience, the last six years I’ve been CTO of Snaploader, a small start-up in Australia which turns floor-plans and CAD drawings into real-time rendered 3D buildings that run in your browser (including mobile). HQ is interstate, thus the role has always been near 100% remote. There’s a team of 20+ 3D artists and sales, but development is a one man show. So I’m responsible for a pretty absurd amount.

I also occasionally take on casual consulting gigs, which typically come about from my open source contributions. Currently I’m consulting for Berserk Games. I work on their Lua language bindings, public API documentation, networking and tooling for the (user content centric) game Tabletop Simulator (Unity/C#). I also help out their developer community with support, libraries, documentation and example projects i.e. developer advocacy.

Please do peruse my Github. I’m after something senior where I can take some ownership, but ideally also contribute across a breadth of projects/technologies.

Me: Okay. I'm just going to prototype a game. Don't want to get carried away. I won't even write a game engine. I'll use Tabletop Simulator.

Friend: Sounds good. How's it going?

Me: Well. I needed to be able to debug my code. https://github.com/tts-community/moonsharp-tts-debug

Friend: Oh, neat. So your game is done now?

Me: Not exactly. I had to had in matchmaking by reverse engineering Steam. https://github.com/SteamRE/SteamKit/pull/704

Friend: Ah. Alright. Can I play it now?

Me: Nah, I was finding it hard to maintain code. I wrote a Lua code bundler. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/luabundle

Friend: Sweet.

Me: Yeah, but I decided to integrate it into the official tooling. https://github.com/Berserk-Games/atom-tabletopsimulator-lua/...

Friend: I'm sure the community will be thankful.

Me: I hope so. I now run a small community of TTS developers. https://github.com/tts-community/

Friend: Right. You must be done by now.

Me: Nah, I couldn't statically type check my code. So I wrote some types. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/tts-types

Friend: Seems unnecessary for a prototype, but sure.

Me: I had to write my own IDE to use them though. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

Friend: Right... So how'd the game going then?

Me: Oh, I'm not doing that anymore. I now consult for Berserk Games, developers of Tabletop Simulator

Friend: ...

Atom (most basic), Vscode with emmylua (debugging) and tabletop simulator lua, or Intellij with luanalysis (type safety). all are really good depending on your use case. I have never used the scripting window, even for simple scripts.

it's based off MIR, does it have something to do with https://mlir.llvm.org/ ?

for typed lua, there is another effort https://github.com/teal-language/tl in addition to the mentioned typescript approach: https://github.com/andremm/typedlua

I had the pleasure of working with Lua 5.1 back in the late noughties. For me it's replaced Tcl whenever I want something I can configure above a C library. At the time I used it I found it quite nice but I'll also not forget the hours I wasted tracking down nil table corruptions which could have easily been caught by a type checker.

I had some hope that Luau https://luau-lang.org or Teal https://github.com/teal-language/tl would make things better but with the following example

    function foo(x: number): string

I wonder why the author doesn't use Teal [0] - a typed dialect of lua.

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

Check out Teal

There is already https://github.com/teal-language/tl, which is typed Lua. I think fennel exists to serve a different niche-- personally I use it not for any type features; I just like the syntax better, and others may find certain features like the macro system useful.

There's also some languages made to compile straight to Lua: - MoonScript is the most popular Lua wrapper - it's built to be more Python-like, featuring indentation-based scopes, function calls without parentheses, lambda syntax, list comprehension, and much more. - Yuescript is a modern update to MoonScript that adds more features (I haven't used it myself, so I'm not entirely sure exactly how it differs from MS). - Teal is a version of Lua that adds static typing for better code standards.

Terra and Nelua are both very different in goals than Teal. Teal is literally gradual types integrated into Lua keeping as many of Lua's idioms as possible (to a fault[1]). Terra and Nelua are both very metaprogrammable systems programming languages. Nelua's goals are primarily to soften C's rough edges, comparable to something like Nim.

There's another one you missed in Pallene[2]. But again, it's goal was to optimize the stack sharing involved in using the C API. It also adds types though and maintains Lua idioms as much as possible.

[1]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/discussions/339

[2]: https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene