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Top 5 Lua Compiler Projects
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Teal creator here! Thank you for the kind words, super happy to see people being productive with it!!
On your wishlist items:
1. There are a few third-party projects that bundle Lua code. One that comes to mind is https://lrocket.codeberg.page/ — I don't know if this functionality should be brought into Teal itself, it sounds to me like something better left to the surrounding tooling?
2. Unfortunately those annoyances are part of the heterogeinity of the Lua ecosystem, but Teal tries to paper over them using the compat53 library (which, granted, is not available everywhere if you want to do a pure-Lua deployment on existing Lua environments). The --gen-target and --gen-compat flags should still help some, hopefully!
3. Not sure what you mean there -- you mean adding chunks of untyped Lua _in the same file_? I think that if you have a json.lua and a json.d.tl file, then it should use the definition file only and leave the .lua file alone. At least that's the intended behavior!
4. That's up to GitHub :) Last time I checked their docs I think they want something like 100 or 200 projects using the language for considering adding native highlighting for it on the website. But you can add a .gitattributes file to the root of your repository like this https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/master/.gitattribut... and at least it will display .tl files with .lua highlighting.
Again, thank you so much for the feedback!
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nelua-lang
Minimal, efficient, statically-typed and meta-programmable systems programming language heavily inspired by Lua, which compiles to C and native code.
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compiler.nvim
Neovim compiler for building and running your code without having to configure anything
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Lua Compiler discussion
Lua Compiler related posts
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The Teal Programming Language
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Teal: TypeScript for Lua
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What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?
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Nelua Programming Language
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Nelua: Statically typed language with a Lua flavor
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Ravi is a dialect of Lua, with JIT and AOT compilers
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Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 1 Sep 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Compiler projects in Lua? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | tl | 2,547 |
| 2 | nelua-lang | 2,260 |
| 3 | compiler.nvim | 618 |
| 4 | LuaRT-Studio | 96 |
| 5 | rtc | 69 |
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