Impressions of Teal

About two months ago, I found the Teal programming language, which describes itself as a statically-typed dialect of Lua. It transpiles to Lua and runs typecheck on the developer’s machine, so it fills roughly the same niche as TypeScript. It’s used by quite a few projects, including LuaRocks and inspect.

For better or worse, I am trying to write Lua without feeling like it’s year 2010, and Teal promised to be suitable for this purpose.

This post is a retrospective on my experience: what went right and what, in my opinion, could be improved. Mostly the latter.

Disclaimer: while I stumbled upon multiple issues, I deeply respect everyone who works on this project, and I consider it a valuable tool. No offence intended.