windowjs VS TypeScriptToLua

I had two ideas for Typescript in mind:

1. provide type declarations for the Window.js APIs, and

2. integrate with the Typescript compiler during development (e.g. F5 to reload, run typescript sources "directly", show compiler errors in the console / main window, etc.)

I've just started these discussion on GitHub, please share your thoughts:

https://github.com/windowjs/windowjs/discussions/27

https://github.com/windowjs/windowjs/discussions/28

Does this cover what you had in mind? Are there better ways to support Typescript?

I've had some success with https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

Luau may be an alternative as well, haven't tried it.

I love Lua, but at larger scales it's unmanageable.

There are some plugins (typescript.nvim) that use a Typescript to lua transpiler (TypescriptToLua]

54:28 reminded me of TypeScriptToLua, so if you wanted to, then you could turn this into Lua :^)

One immediate comparison that springs to my mind is the Löve 2D engine [1], which is a tiny game engine written entirely around Lua scripting (so that Lua includes the full game run loop as well).

Lua is a good scripting language, but it doesn't have the ubiquity of JS (and Löve doesn't have the ubiquitous deployment of the modern browser). Also, Lua doesn't have a static type ecosystem (though there are interesting projects like TypescriptToLua [2] exploring that space, but you can from the name they are following/lagging the JS ecosystem here).

There probably is a need to package more browser games as "real" games and a lightweight Canvas-focused approach could find a nice like Löve, especially if it were easier, for instance, to maybe port to consoles for small/indie game teams than one of the web views or Electron. (Though certainly Microsoft already has a version of WebView2 running on the Xbox.)

[1] https://love2d.org/

[2] https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

Not part of the mods, but using https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua is quite easy and works surprisingly well. You can find some of the type definitions for computercraft here: https://github.com/Eforen/cc-tweaked-types/tree/master/declarations

It might be helpful to keep in mind: Typescript is a compiler that parses a Typescript AST and prints out whatever you want. So if your goal is to use it in a JS context, the only thing regulating what you do with it is that it outputs valid JS that can be interpreted by the various JS engines. There are projects like TypeScriptToLua which uses the TS compiler to print out Lua code.

You can take a look at TypescriptToLua which transforms the TS AST into Lua code using the compiler API, however I think you're barking up the wrong tree. The TS compiler works on *it's own\* AST generated from parsed Typescript. You can see how they implement your own type here. What you have some structured data and want to turn it into a type definition. That's just some loops you write yourself over data you've hopefully structured in a sane way. Turn it into a string, write it to a file with the extension `.d.ts`. No libraries needed.