webassembly-lua VS tl

Not sure why'd you think this would have anything to do with WASM, the homepage is really clear what this is: "Fengari is the Lua VM written in JavaScript. It uses JavaScript's garbage collector so that interoperability with the DOM is non-leaky.". WASM wouldn't use JS's GC, nor would provide interop with the DOM, so for the stated goals of this project, WASM would be a non-starter.

There is prior art for Lua -> WASM in case you're interested in that: https://github.com/ysugimoto/webassembly-lua

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