moonscript VS Fennel

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:

Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

https://fennel-lang.org

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

* https://fennel-lang.org/

I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.

If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.

There's fennel if you're a fan of LISP syntax. I like embedding lua because it's light and easy and doesn't re-engineer itself every six months like python; but I agree, the lua syntax certainly is fugly.