Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

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 navigating a minefield. The lack of type system made it all too easy to introduce bugs.

But lua isn't like that. It's not weakly typed like javascript - it's more akin to pythons dynamic duck typing system. Its simplicity makes it remarkably easy to write clean maintainable code. Type checking with type is straightforward compared to python, mostly because there are only five basic types (technically seven but I've never used userdata or thread). And I even started to enjoy using metatables once I understood how and when to apply them.

That being said, lua's lack of popularity probably stems from its limited stdlib, which often feels incomplete, and the absence of a robust package manager. luarocks is a pain to work with.

All that being said, I don't really see the point of using this project.

While I do wish type annotations were a native feature, the ones provided by the lsp are good enough for me.

I've had a similar journey to you — I've gotten familiar with Lua through using embedded Lua in apps like Neovim, Hammerspoon, Sbarlua and Wezterm. But unfortunately I feel the exact opposite: the more I use Lua, the more I hate it.

Lua doesn't have as many warts as languages like JavaScript or PHP do. The worst offenders are probably the 1-indexing (more of an stdlib issue than a language issue) and variables being global by default (same as JavaScript). It's a minimalist language and I guess this is one of the reason it is so popular as embedded language. But that's exactly why I find myself preferring even (modern) JavaScript to Lua. Lua is so barebones it's just too painful to use for anyone who got used to programming in other languages.

> That being said, lua's lack of popularity probably stems from its limited stdlib, which often feels incomplete, and the absence of a robust package manager. luarocks is a pain to work with.

And that's the crux of it. I guess many people are fine with writing tons of WET code using a barebones library and a bunch of copy-pasted code files thrown around when it comes to their personal scripts. That's all fine, but my brain isn't wired that way and I just feel excruciating pain every time I realize I have to write Lua again.

Luarocks is painful to use, but the main problem is that every embedded Lua you use deals with packages differently. Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and LuaJIT are all incompatible with each other, since every version has breaking changes. Additionally, due to the lack of a standard library, many lua packages have to rely on native code, which makes portability and compatibility even worse. It all means that Lua doesn't really have a package ecosystem.

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

I don't understand how Lua is less weakly typed than Java. Both of these languages have dynamic typing and do not support any type annotations or type inference in their core dialects, and both languages have "duck typing".

Where I feel JavaScript is vastly superior to Lua is tooling. JavaScript linters and language servers are far more advanced than Lua language servers, to the point where they can detect a lot of errors that I would waste hours on debugging with Lua. Due to Lua's atrociously bad error messages, without writing a lot of error handling code and copious printf statements, it would be quite hard to find where you've even made a typo in a variable name once your code gets large enough.

So yeah, I get why for some people Lua can be fun, because it's conceptually minimalist, but in practice I hate it with passion.