Comment by pansa2

22 days ago

> statically-typed

> Embed/extend in C

Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua?

Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available.

3 comments

pansa2

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publicdebates  21 days ago

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  20 days ago

    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.)