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Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

(teal-language.org)
218 points generichuman | 2 comments | 16 May 25 00:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.521s | source
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koeng ◴[16 May 25 03:40 UTC] No.44001640[source]▶
I really love teal! Here is a 10k loc project I have in it - https://github.com/Koeng101/libB/blob/dev/src/dnadesign/dnad... - Basically, I reimplemented all my synthetic biology bioinformatics from Go into teal so that LLMs can script with it better in a hermetic environment. It's got all sorts of things like cloning simulation, codon optimization, genbank parsing, synthesis fixing, reliable sequence hashing, sequence analysis, etc. I'm pretty sure it is a more complete synbio library than anything in python, actually.

A couple things I want from teal: 1. I wish there was a better way to bundle files together. I have a little build.lua, but eh, I think it could be better. I know of cyan and everything but I feel like that was developed for a different application than mine. I want to have 1 complete file that I can just give people and allow them to do synbio work in any target language with a lua machine. 2. There are some annoyances around luajit vs lua5.1 functionality 3. The compiler yelling at you gets old for integrating raw lua. I tried to port json.lua in and even with the definition file, I couldn't embed the whole json.lua without having compiler errors. So eventually I just imported it as a string that is type checked, which is bad 4. I really wish syntax highlighting on github was a thing

The good bits:

It's pretty much complete. I used it a couple years ago and there were things with generics that I just couldn't do, but now it is much better. For example, how I use generics for the different parsers (fastq, fasta, genbank, slow5, pileup, etc) https://github.com/Koeng101/libB/blob/dev/src/dnadesign/src/...

Overall, love it! It is one of those pieces of software which is nearly complete, and I love using software like that.

replies(1): >>44005481 #
1. hisham_hm ◴[16 May 25 13:45 UTC] No.44005481[source]▶
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!

replies(1): >>44007856 #
2. koeng ◴[16 May 25 17:21 UTC] No.44007856[source]▶
1. Yeah, there are third party bundlers, but none of em worked too well for me. You are right: it should be separate

2. If I recall correctly, gen-target didn't hit it because I was using some very esoteric bullshit from the luajit internal spec that couldn't have nice typing

3. Yes, untyped lua in the same file. The problem is that I want everything in a single file for distribution and embedding - kind of like the SQLite amalgamation. It'd be super cool to just add in my dnadesign.lua or dnadesign.tl file and have full bioinformatics in almost any language! Definition files don't work as well there - I still kind of use them for the type definitions, but then embed the raw file as a string

4. YES THANK YOU! I'm not sure if it is in the docs but this is SO useful!