TIC-80 VS moonscript

Or the more free TIC-80. I have paid for both, but never used either enough to be able to say one or the other has any significant advantages.

https://tic80.com/

I wish the community moved to an open source option like TIC-80[0].

0. https://tic80.com/

Main differences are: 16:9 aspect ratio, no cpu limits and many languages to tinker with: lua, js, squirrel, wren, janet, wasm, ... and just recently - a Python support was added.

https://tic80.com

Included native builds for windows, mac, linux, html, and also TIC-80's .PNG, .TIC and .LUA formats. Try out the web version here - https://tic80.com/play?cart=3424 See the TIC-80 wiki for instructions on exporting https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/wiki

https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/ - TIC-80 website (for running .lua .png or .tic files) as well as TIC-80 documentation.

Try https://tic80.com/ instead of PICO-8, it's a free open-source alternative and still fun.

Tho personally I've come to prefer making my games in https://love2d.org and https://tic80.com

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. things like +=, ++, are not possible, which means the only solution is to transpile into it, which has led to some good languages like moonscript[0], teal[1] which offers static type checking, an absolute must as your codebase grows.

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

That can be very productive and clever, but be - and stay - aware that such polyglot solutions tend to be maintenance headaches in the longer run.

There is a really nice open source project out there that allows you to train your hearing and your sightreading, but it's written in the authors own language which in turn compiles to JavaScript and the headache to set up their toolchain is such that I haven't bothered fixing any of the bugs that I'm aware of (and there are plenty).

https://sightreading.training/

https://github.com/leafo/sightreading.training

It's written in a language called 'Moonscript':

https://github.com/leafo/moonscript

Which compiles to Lua. Which compiles to JS.

Madness. Nice madness, but still, it stopped me from being a contributor.

RE: the cost of switching at this point, what about languages that compile to Lua? Like https://moonscript.org/. That would let you keep the legacy code, no?

In the case of Lapis, it is actually written in Moonscript, which needs a few more things.

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.

A programmer-friendly language that compiles to Lua.

This is a sample code for learning, written in Moonscript for TIC-80: