[publicdebates]

Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua.

There have been some attempts:

Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)

Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)

Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)

The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.

[debugnik]

Note that some of those can't run on a regular Lua runtime.

Luau is a separate implementation of a Lua dialect. However, it's backed by Roblox and being increasingly used in high budget games such as Alan Wake 2, and tools like Rive.

And Terra is more of a low-level language embedded in regular Lua for metaprogramming, than a statically-typed Lua.

In this vein there's also Pallene, which integrates better with regular Lua on a slightly-patched Lua runtime.

https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene

(BTW the links for Nelua and Luau repos got mixed.)

[publicdebates]

Also it looks like[1] Luau is the official Roblox Studio scripting language, and is baed on Lua 5.1 (possibly LuaJIT?) which means it's behind mainstream Lua.

Not sure which Lua versions the others are based on.

[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau