TypeScriptToLua VS lua-languages

This is super cool. I have been using TypeScript To Lua (https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua) for a little game side project and it works quite well, I am pleased with it. It does end up generating a lot of Lua code though because it has to support all of TypeScript’s features, which isn’t ideal. I’d expect Teal’s output to be much more concise Lua which has me interested.

I've had some success with https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

Luau may be an alternative as well, haven't tried it.

I love Lua, but at larger scales it's unmanageable.

There are some plugins (typescript.nvim) that use a Typescript to lua transpiler (TypescriptToLua]

54:28 reminded me of TypeScriptToLua, so if you wanted to, then you could turn this into Lua :^)

One immediate comparison that springs to my mind is the Löve 2D engine [1], which is a tiny game engine written entirely around Lua scripting (so that Lua includes the full game run loop as well).

Lua is a good scripting language, but it doesn't have the ubiquity of JS (and Löve doesn't have the ubiquitous deployment of the modern browser). Also, Lua doesn't have a static type ecosystem (though there are interesting projects like TypescriptToLua [2] exploring that space, but you can from the name they are following/lagging the JS ecosystem here).

There probably is a need to package more browser games as "real" games and a lightweight Canvas-focused approach could find a nice like Löve, especially if it were easier, for instance, to maybe port to consoles for small/indie game teams than one of the web views or Electron. (Though certainly Microsoft already has a version of WebView2 running on the Xbox.)

[1] https://love2d.org/

[2] https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

Not part of the mods, but using https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua is quite easy and works surprisingly well. You can find some of the type definitions for computercraft here: https://github.com/Eforen/cc-tweaked-types/tree/master/declarations

It might be helpful to keep in mind: Typescript is a compiler that parses a Typescript AST and prints out whatever you want. So if your goal is to use it in a JS context, the only thing regulating what you do with it is that it outputs valid JS that can be interpreted by the various JS engines. There are projects like TypeScriptToLua which uses the TS compiler to print out Lua code.

> Also, I’m not aware of any static typing add-ons for Lua

I'd not cal TypeScript an addon to JS. It's a language that transpiles to JS (and so does CoffeScript, Elm, etc. etc.)

There are many language projects that transpile to Lua:

https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages?tab=readme-ov-fi...

This post inspired me to look for an ML-like language that compiles to lua and I found this useful list: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

There's a complete list of languages that compile to Lua available here: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

There are a ton of different ways to do this but you haven't given enough information to give useful advice. What kind of language do you want to make? "as a module of smth else" doesn't really mean anything. https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

There's also gpanders/nvim-moonwalker, which advertises Fennel in it's readme but works for any x->lua language you return the lua code for, ie: teal, moonscript, uh... others?

I went on a several-weeks-long fact finding mission (the longest of its kind I've ever done in my 10 years as a professional software developer).

The option that won was to write all business logic (a few thousand lines of code) in Lua, then write the GUI in each platform's native language+ui-library combination and re-use the same business logic by embedding Lua.

Another option that made the shortlist was using Haxe instead of Lua, but after several weeks, it became clear that that was a bad idea, and with Lua, the developer experience is now so much better.

I definitely plan on continuing to use Lua as my main programming language.

This comes after 20 years of having python as my main programming language because I'm displeased with feature creep and bloat on python. With lua, I find that I barely miss any features/abilities from the vastly more complex python while the simplicity of lua means my code gets to "go places" where python can't go.

With lua, you find casual implementers making fully compatible alternative implementations (e.g. NeoLua for C#, Luna for Java, fengari for JavaScript, ...) With Python, alternative implementations seemingly just can't keep up with the pace at which CPython is introducing unnecessary new features and CPython-compatbility is de-facto the only meaningful python standard there is. Jython and IronPython would make the platform so much more appealing, but they appear dead in the water. Python implementations for the browser pop up every couple of years only to quietly disappear again.

What's more: Once you've settled on Lua as am embedding language, developers of Lua logic are free to use not just Lua, but they can pick from a host of cool transpile-to-Lua languages [1].

[1] https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

However, there are many languages to which this doesn’t apply (before Fennel I’ve tried to write Minetest mods in Haxe without success).

Maybe most of them are also small projects, but there are a lot of projects that compile other languages to Lua: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages .

Doubtful, but there is TypescriptToLua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Here's a whole list of languages that compile to Lua (many of them statically typed): https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages