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Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

(teal-language.org)
218 points generichuman | 4 comments | 16 May 25 00:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.706s | source
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90s_dev ◴[16 May 25 01:06 UTC] No.44000882[source]▶
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.

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RS-232 ◴[16 May 25 01:17 UTC] No.44000949[source]▶
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.

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1. RonaldK9 ◴[16 May 25 01:35 UTC] No.44001045[source]▶
I don't think it's a good language, and I hate it. I've made thousands of the same mistakes with it—typing . instead of :. There's a reason Lua has a smaller audience than assembly.
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2. Philpax ◴[16 May 25 09:25 UTC] No.44003352[source]▶
> There's a reason Lua has a smaller audience than assembly.

I don't think that's true. It's a very embedded language. Its use in video games and video game modding alone would outnumber the number of people directly writing assembly to achieve things.

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3. shakna ◴[16 May 25 11:09 UTC] No.44003919[source]▶
Or the number of routers that are using it, or other deployable hardware...
4. 90s_dev ◴[16 May 25 12:56 UTC] No.44004898[source]▶
It's also a very old embeddable language, which is probably most of why it's so often chosen for that purpose. Many similar languages have been written from scratch inspired by Lua over the last 10-15 years, some of them almost definitely better than Lua in many respects, but they get no traction because Lua has all the steam. Unfortunate, because the authors of Lua are fairly happy with semantic and syntactic decisions that many of us are very unhappy with.