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Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

teal-language.org

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Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#111

Post by augusto-moura »

0xFEE1DEAD wrote: post #73

Years ago, I tried lua and wasn't impressed. Then I started using Neovim, did the necessary configuration in lua, but continued writing my own scripts in vimscript. Later I started using wezterm and decided to give lua a second shot, and I began to really like it. I realized my initial dislike for lua stemmed from my experience with javascript (back in the jwquery days), where maintaining large codebases felt like na…

BTW, you might want to check Lux [1], it's a new approach for Lua packaging. They launched it recently, so there's a lot of work going on. But it looks and feels very promising

[1]: https://github.com/nvim-neorocks/lux

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#112

Post by growlNark »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #77
growlNark wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you compare via semantics Lua and Javascript make sense to liken. But in terms of complexity, Lua is far more like C. There's no unfucking all the horrible decisions baked into javascript and I wouldn't touch it with a ninety-foot pole, but Lua still has some hope.

To be fair Lua also made some bad decisions, though maybe not as bad as javascript: - tables being used for both objects and arrays can create a lot of confusion, especially when you have some integer keys, but not all, and especially when they are not consecutive or one of them is 0 - indexes start at 1 - assigning nil deinitializes variables/entries instead of assigning the value `nil` (this becomes especially bad…

No disagreement here; I also fundamentally question the cardinal indexing and conflation between table and array. But it's at least internally consistent and certainly makes more sense than mandatorily indexing arrays with floating point.

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#113

Post by nmz »

jiehong wrote: post #69
pmarreck wrote: post #16

I've been diving into Lua (a little late to this party, but turns out it's a perfect language to rewrite some commandline scripts I had that were getting unwieldy in Bash, especially with LLM assistance!) and it's really something of an eye-opener. LuaJITted Lua code runs at 80% (on average, sometimes faster!) of the compiled C version of the same algorithm , typically. Lua is embedded in a surprisingly massive numbe…

Any recommendations going from bash to lua to watch out for except indexing?

I do think you're better off using ruby, but if you insist.

Lots of default functionality missing so you MUST have these packages: inspect, luaposix, lrexlib-pcre, lrexlib-posix, lpeg, luastd/stdlib, luasocket, luahttp, luasec, luacheck, penlight

* luajit is unnecessary in almost all cases, you don't need the speed.

* use lsp or luacheck whenever you write something, entr -c luacheck file on everything.

* patterns are not regex which means they do not support lookups, backtracking or |, so you must install lrexlib-pcre or lrexlib-posix (frankly I never need pcre so I stick to lrexlib-gnu or lrexlib-posix).

* overload _ENV so it auto requires unknown things, I have a lua wrapper that does this and it makes it a joy not having all of my scripts with a bunch of require"posix" on all of them

* install inspect to inspect tables

* os.execute and io.popen only accepts strings as parameters which means you should overload it and make a function that accepts tables as well.

* 5.4 is still lacking support for many libraries, 5.3 has most of the libraries.

* assignments default to the global environment so you have to use local keyword or set _ENV to error on assignment (or better yet, don't care, just local _ENV = mymodule)

Overall, Lua is just a mixture of C with a pascal syntax and garbage collection (and also tables which is a weird data structure)

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#114

Post by xigoi »

growlNark wrote: post #17
90s_dev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing like C, and that's so much of its charm. Semantically, Lua is almost identical to the core of JavaScript. Metatables are a genius alternative to prototype chains. Lua's syntax is beautifully simple and unambiguous, but at the cost of being moderately inconvenient in 2025 unfortunately. It could benefit from an ESNext-style renewal. I get why they made the C API that way, but in practice it's very easy to…

Sure, if you compare via semantics Lua and Javascript make sense to liken. But in terms of complexity, Lua is far more like C. There's no unfucking all the horrible decisions baked into javascript and I wouldn't touch it with a ninety-foot pole, but Lua still has some hope.

You’re using C as an example of a language that is easy to understand?

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#115

Post by xigoi »

3036e4 wrote: post #51
isr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, for those who may not be aware, moonscript is the "coffeescript" for lua. It has been in production use for quite a while (the author of moonscript also created itch.io, using ... moonscript). yuescript, from the dora-ssr game engine dev, is essentially moonscript-2.0 And of course, if you want to treat lua as the scheme-like it really is (deep down), then ... fennel. Lots of choices. They all compile to straigh…

If Teal is the TypeScript of Lua, Fennel is the ClojureScript. Except Fennel is fully implemented in Lua itself and it transpiles (usually) to very simple, plain Lua code without much (if any) overhead and with no run-time library other than what is in Lua itself. https://fennel-lang.org/

The JavaScript equivalent of Fennel is Sibilant: https://sibilant.org/

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#116

Post by pmarreck »

Rochus wrote: post #99
Symmetry wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code in Are-we-fast-yet has been heavily optimized. It might still be true that naive LuaJIT can run almost as fast as Naive C.

Have a look at the results and the code; there are benchmarks in the suite where the (ideomatic) C/C++ implementation is "only" twice as fast as the corresponding (idiomatic) Lua implementation, but on average (geomean of all factors) it's about five times as fast. The guidelines of the benchmark are pretty strict to enable fair comparisons (see https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/blob/master/docs/gu... ).

I looked at the docs. This seems to be comparing against Lua, which is why I specifically said LuaJIT

This is quite a distinction to be made. Can you clarify?

Directly from their guidelines page:

    Lua
    
    We write code compatible with Lua 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3.
    Smalltalk/Ruby symbols are represented as normal strings.
    We use Lua 1-based array and the length operator #.
    We use single object when a class is not required.
    Bitwise operators with various Lua versions is a nightmare.
    We use luacheck as a linter.
If they are writing code compatible with Lua 5.2 or 5.3, then that cannot be LuaJIT, which is ONLY compatible with Lua 5.1. (Unless they mean that they JUST write 5.1 code, which due to backwards compatibility is runnable on 5.2 and 5.3? It's unclear from here.)

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#117

Post by ayrtondesozzla »

90s_dev wrote: post #89
ayrtondesozzla wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and GP both mean that this TEAL is adjacent to crptocurrency, and therefore, who cares about stepping on toes? This heuristic works well in most cases maybe, but will lead to false positives sometimes. May I gently suggest that this might be one of those cases. Algorand is the project of this fellow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Micali Credentials aren't faultless but they do provide a certain we…

I meant that I have a sort of affection for Lua, so it gets preferential treatment in my book, and therefore Teal ought to get the name above another relatively random project with the same name.

Ah ok - fair enough :)

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#118

Post by 90s_dev »

0xFEE1DEAD wrote: post #73

Years ago, I tried lua and wasn't impressed. Then I started using Neovim, did the necessary configuration in lua, but continued writing my own scripts in vimscript. Later I started using wezterm and decided to give lua a second shot, and I began to really like it. I realized my initial dislike for lua stemmed from my experience with javascript (back in the jwquery days), where maintaining large codebases felt like na…

> But lua isn't like that. It's not weakly typed like javascript - it's more akin to pythons dynamic duck typing system

What? No, Lua's type system is practically identical to JavaScript's.

Even metatables are extraordinarily similar to prototype chains via __index (though much more powerful since they allow for operator overloading, which I wish JS had).

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#119

Post by TulliusCicero »

pansa2 wrote: post #20

> Teal is a statically-typed dialect of Lua. I was expecting Teal to be "Lua + type annotations", similar to Mypy. However from a quick look it does indeed seem to be a "dialect" in its own right. Teal is Lua-like and compiles to Lua, but there's more to it than just static types. Perhaps it's more similar to TypeScript? For example, Teal replaces Lua's tables - the language's signature single, highly-flexible data s…

> Perhaps it's more similar to TypeScript?

I mean that's exactly what the page says, doesn't it?

> It aims to fill a niche similar to that of TypeScript in the JavaScript world, but adhering to Lua's spirit of minimalism, portability and embeddability.

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#120

Post by andre-la »

90s_dev wrote: post #79
dottrap wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I really wish the Lua authors would add official types to Lua. > Never going to happen IMO. Adding static types would change the nature of the language completely, even more than it has in Python. You both are kind of right. The Lua authors have been working on the new companion language to Lua named Pallene. Pallene is a subset of Lua that adds types, not for the sake of types themselves, but for the purpose of p…

Docs https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene/blob/master/doc/manu... Looks similar to Teal. This is relatively exciting. Also, called it! Disappointed that it maintains syntactic Lua compatibility. Would have been a good time for a clean slate on the shoulders of hindsight.

> Looks similar to Teal.

That's because they share a common origin from Typed Lua and Titan languages:

https://teal-language.org/book/other_projects.html

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