Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

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.

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.

Every language has warts. Even Lua.

Like another commenter said, using . instead of : is maybe the most common mistake, too easy to make. And Lua offers no help preventing or checking it.

TypeScript is a great language. So is Lua. So is C.

When used carefully to avoid their warts. Learning how to do that for any language takes time and practice though.