tl

The compiler for Teal, a typed dialect of Lua (by teal-language)

Tl Alternatives

Similar projects and alternatives to tl

  1. love

    266 tl VS love

    LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.

  2. InfluxDB

    InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

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  3. Fennel

    96 tl VS Fennel

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  4. Oberon

    87 tl VS Oberon

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  5. lua-language-server

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  6. luau

    73 tl VS luau

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  7. LuaJIT

    56 tl VS LuaJIT

    Mirror of the LuaJIT git repository

  8. Wren

    48 tl VS Wren

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  10. terra

    43 tl VS terra

    Terra is a low-level system programming language that is embedded in and meta-programmed by the Lua programming language.

  11. moonscript

    40 tl VS moonscript

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  12. nelua-lang

    35 tl VS nelua-lang

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  13. fengari

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  14. mun

    26 tl VS mun

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  15. Smalltalk

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  16. pallene

    21 tl VS pallene

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  17. Prosody IM

    IMPORTANT: due to a drive failure, as of 13-Mar-2021, the Mercurial repository had to be re-mirrored, which changed every commit SHA. The old SHAs and trees are backed up in the vault branches. Please migrate to the new branches as soon as you can.

  18. lua-languages

    Languages that compile to Lua

  19. nvim-oxi

    13 tl VS nvim-oxi

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  20. IntelliJ-Luanalysis

    Type-safe Lua IDE — IntelliJ IDEA plugin

  21. OpenBB

    220 tl VS OpenBB

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  22. YueScript

    8 tl VS YueScript

    A MoonScript dialect compiles to Lua.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better tl alternative or higher similarity.

tl discussion

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tl reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of tl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-15.
  • The Teal Programming Language
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 May 2025
    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!

  • Lune (Rust-based Luau runtime) 0.9.0 released
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Apr 2025
    Yep. Luau has an LSP so you should be able to get all that.

    There is no support for Luau in Love2D though. You would have to author your code in Teal (typed lua to lua compiler) and then compile that to Lua to be run in Love: https://github.com/teal-language/tl

    You can get the Lua LSP working in Love2D with full completion support by the way. The Lua LSP has 3rd party libraries included in it. You can see all the preinstalled ones here: https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/tree/master/3rd

    Support for them as built-ins will be removed at some point though. But you can always add them yourself: https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/wiki/Settings#w... using the files from here: https://github.com/LuaCATS/love2d/

    It looks like the easiest way to support them is using a `.luarc.json` file though: https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/wiki/Configurat...

    Here is a project that is already set up with a config file that you should be able to just copy: https://github.com/jonasgeiler/love2d-joystick-tester/blob/m...

  • Free high-performance cross-platform game engine
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Apr 2025
  • Luon programming language combines concepts from Oberon and Lua
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2024
  • Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?
    132 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2024
    I need to clean up this page but I'm working on a local(-ish) book collection tool (calling it Livtet for "book head" in Haitian Kreyol). https://www.jacky.wtf/projects/livtet/ has some notes but https://man.sr.ht/~jacky/livtet is much better. It's been fun using Lua to externalize a lot of logic (and I'm looking into using https://github.com/teal-language/tl because I love me some typing.

    Outside of that, I've been blogging a lot more (https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/ - August looks so full, ha) and now I'm writing about things I'm reading too (https://www.jacky.wtf/links/). Been doing this to try to ween off social media and rely on places like this to share stuff.

  • Pallene: A statically compiled companion language for Lua
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2024
  • Teal: TypeScript for Lua
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jul 2024
  • QuickJS, the Next Generation: a mighty JavaScript engine
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jul 2024
    Teal (https://github.com/teal-language/tl) is the closest we have from a "TypeScript for Lua". It is natively supported by many projects now, including game engines such as the Bevy scripting plugin and Defold.
  • What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2024
    I don't think Teal can be total. Lua is super expressive and you would need to get deep into dependent types and whatnot to caption a fraction of the power of its types.

    > Some Lua libraries use complex dynamic types that can't be easily represented in Teal. In those cases, using any and making explicit casts is our last resort.

    https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/master/docs/tutoria...

    Personally if I paid the cost of having an extra compile step then I would rather wish for some serious type safety like what Elm or Reason provide. But then you end up with a different language.

    I agree though that for your use case of making complicated libraries Teal might be actually good fit.

    I was going to argue that Luau is superior anyway if you really can't cope with annotations but obviously if you want to make libraries for lua users that doesn't work. (Though I guess you could technically compile down from Luau, just not sure if anyone has ever bothered.)

  • Ravi is a dialect of Lua, with JIT and AOT compilers
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
    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

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    www.influxdata.com | 16 Jun 2025
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4 days ago

teal-language/tl is an open source project licensed under MIT License which is an OSI approved license.

The primary programming language of tl is Lua.


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