fengari VS tl

it should be possible, the article mentions https://fengari.io/ (a Lua VM written in JavaScript)

Check out Fengari or Lapis. Fun fact: itch.io is written primarily in Lua, and started by the same person who made Lapis and MoonScript.

I was real excited to see these recently... have you tried any? https://fengari.io/ is the one I was most intrigued by.

Hello, there is also fengari: https://fengari.io/

Other languages have done that :)

Lua in the browser: https://fengari.io/

And then you can use that to run Fennel, a Lisp that compiles to Lua https://fennel-lang.org/

I think TypeScript also has a script you can include that lets you put your TS code in a special script tag, and it gets compiled in-browser.

just use lua, it’s what should have been used for web scripting anyways

Please stop this stuck in the mud nonsense. Anyone stumbling upon lua.org might think the project is dead already. The material is great, close to the best, but its presentation is pure shite. Not mobile friendly (what kinds of device do you think the majority of people in the Global South use?). We live in a world of code highlighting, none of that in PiL. We live in a world where Fengari allows Lua to run in the browser, does that make an appearance on lua.org, allowing users to immediately play with the language? Of course not! It's almost as if the Lua team is trying to push away potential users.

why not use lua

Just use lua https://fengari.io/

Definitely the most surprising use-case for Lua that I've seen is http://lua.space/webdev/why-we-rewrote-lua-in-js which discusses https://fengari.io/.

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