luacheck VS tl

Not directly related, but luacheck can also help with this.

Yeah. While you're at it, make a habit of running luacheck on your files as it helps catch a lot of these issues that can sneak in by mistake: https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck

Using something like https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck might be helpful too. Will check all the files in a directory and will let you know which one might be problematic.

I'm trying to setup luacheck (via null-ls) to run alongside sumneko-lua (via nvim-lspconfig).

Most of the time nothing is used. The thing is that iterating is so quick, that you find the problems really fast.

Although, I've been using luacheck https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck. It is quite nice, but you have to write down the global variables by hand on the config file.

Check out luacheck. It can help spot typos or mistakes you've made and warn against anti-patterns. I'd honestly only look into setting it up locally because there's no benefit to putting it in a CI pipeline unless you have one for another reason IMO. This should be all the config you need:

Sadly the scenario that the successor feature is intended to alleviate has very much become reality. The creator of Luacheck (Peter Melnichenko) passed away a couple of years ago, and ever since then the GitHub repository has been in a state of limbo. Multiple unofficial forks have come and gone, but Peter's is still the first result on Google if you search "luacheck". It isn't even possible to change the README or pin an issue to get people's attention about the fork; to this day people are still posting issues to the old repo.

And Luacheck is "the" Lua static analysis tool that pretty much everyone uses, so it's a very significant issue.

https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck/issues/198

You are probably right, but luacheck is well aware of which global variables are built-in and it has special comments, such as -- no global or --ignore in case you very want to overwrite them.

Calling your function self is as much bad practice as calling it print. Use luacheck to avoid such mistakes.

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