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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

#3

Post by 90s_dev »

I'm so relieved to see more types being added to good languages.

So Teal is to Lua as TypeScript is to JavaScript. Which means it automatically plays well with any Lua environment. Unlike luau and nelua which are also statically typed but have their own runtimes.

What version of Lua does it use? Lua gets new versions every few years so I don't know why so many impls don't continuously upgrade to the latest version.

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#4

Post by 90s_dev »

90s_dev wrote: post #3

I'm so relieved to see more types being added to good languages. So Teal is to Lua as TypeScript is to JavaScript. Which means it automatically plays well with any Lua environment. Unlike luau and nelua which are also statically typed but have their own runtimes. What version of Lua does it use? Lua gets new versions every few years so I don't know why so many impls don't continuously upgrade to the latest version.

> The core compiler has no dependencies and is implemented as a single tl.lua file which you can load into your projects. Running tl.loader() will add Teal support to your package loader, meaning that require() will be able to run .tl files.

Genius design.

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#6

Post by RS-232 »

90s_dev wrote: post #3

I'm so relieved to see more types being added to good languages. So Teal is to Lua as TypeScript is to JavaScript. Which means it automatically plays well with any Lua environment. Unlike luau and nelua which are also statically typed but have their own runtimes. What version of Lua does it use? Lua gets new versions every few years so I don't know why so many impls don't continuously upgrade to the latest version.

Lua is a good language. It's like C, if C were a scripting language.

It's got an awesome C API. It's fast, lightweight, and embeddable. It's more performant than Python. It's a staple in video game scripting.

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#8

Post by Sharlin »

alanh wrote: post #5

Oh, clever name. Typed Lua → TL → "Tee Ell" → Teal And the extension is .tl

Off-topic comment, but as an ESL speaker I just this week randomly learned that teal the color is named after the duck species Anas crecca, called (edit: common or Eurasian) teal in English.

Re: Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

#9

Post by 90s_dev »

RS-232 wrote: post #6
90s_dev wrote: post #3

I'm so relieved to see more types being added to good languages. So Teal is to Lua as TypeScript is to JavaScript. Which means it automatically plays well with any Lua environment. Unlike luau and nelua which are also statically typed but have their own runtimes. What version of Lua does it use? Lua gets new versions every few years so I don't know why so many impls don't continuously upgrade to the latest version.

Lua is a good language. It's like C, if C were a scripting language. It's got an awesome C API. It's fast, lightweight, and embeddable. It's more performant than Python. It's a staple in video game scripting.

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 get wrong.

I'm not sure how fast vanilla Lua is today compared to similar languages. I think LuaJIT (and Luau?) are most often used when performance is needed.

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