terra VS moonscript

Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

Terra is the language you're looking for: https://terralang.org/

Wow, amazing stuff. I love Lua, it was how I learned programming as a kid. Coincidently from the same world as the author. Open Tibia.

The author made a custom client (https://github.com/edubart/otclient) for the game that is still very much in active use by thousands of players. He's a very skilled developer.

Great to see AOT typed Lua, I know of the other solutions: Luau, Teal, TypeScriptToLua, Terra, etc., but this one is my favorite so far.

Love the simple compilation to C (and WASM support via Emscripten). Though Terra's JIT is enticing and good replacement for LuaJIT, this is for embedded systems, it's a good replacement for Lua PUC-Rio.

The World:

- https://luau-lang.org/

- https://terralang.org/

- https://github.com/teal-language/tl

- https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Terra is a language that can also do that, and uses Lua as the metaprogramming language. Types are just Lua values.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of work left kind of half-baked so using the language is a pain... if someone invested a lot of time to make Terra work properly and added some tooling around it, wrote proper docs and so on, it would be a really interesting language.

https://terralang.org/

(I am slightly familiar with a language called Terra (https://terralang.org), which couples C with Lua, where the Lua is basically used as the metaprogramming layer ... sort of like comptime in Zig. And making an SOA data structure is the kind of thing you could do in Lua in Terra. So that was partly the basis for my question).

> why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean

If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems.

> write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...)

You want https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?

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: