tl VS mun

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

Mun is a statically typed language that compiles to machine code with LLVM, designed to be hot-reloadable: https://mun-lang.org/.

Perhaps https://mun-lang.org? Might be a bit raw for your needs tho.

But that’s not all! In total, this release contains 111 pull requests made by 5 of our community contributors and our two Core Team members & Dependabot. Thanks for having our back! For a full list have a look at the changelog, but the main improvements are:

Whenever I read about Mun, I'm always really, really intrigued… Until I remember that it currently has no string type and support for one is not currently planned. That's a bit of a shame, IMHO, because otherwise, this looks great!

There's mun [1] which is statically typed and AOT compiled.

1: https://github.com/mun-lang/mun

From the reverse-dependencies of the salsa crate, the (archived) Lark compiler used it and the Mun compiler uses it.

I notice that there are projects like mun trying to achieve a similar goal, but I'm kind of curious why they are not getting much attention from the community.

Have you heard of https://mun-lang.org/ ?

It's an embeddable scripting language with the goal of being a Rust-like language that supports hot reloading of functions AND data. To achieve the latter, it uses GC'ed memory such that memory can easily be mapped when the memory's type changes.

It's still in early development but maybe one day will serve your needs :)

In terms of pure Rust engines/frameworks it seems the overall "problem" is lack of scripting, at least from my perspective. Mun seemed extremely interesting, but since even the project itself says "don't use it" I guess it's not a real option, and considering the amount of time we spent on the GDScript/Rust integration I'm a little worried that rolling something more custom would be even less efficient.