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teal-language
tl
Lua2020–2026
teal-language / tl

tl

The compiler for Teal, a typed dialect of Lua

42Distinct people
62Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The compiler for Teal, a typed dialect of Lua

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I need to clean up this page but I'm working on a local(-ish) book collection tool (calling it Livtet for "book head" in Haitian Kreyol). https://www.jacky.wtf/projects/livtet/…

jalcine used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year62 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-07-27 13:11:12 UTC to 2026-10-18 09:49:20 UTC.

0510152020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Teal This is the repository of tl, the compiler for Teal, a typed dialect of Lua. The core compiler has no dependencies and is implemented as a single tl.lua file which you can load into your projects. Running tl.loader() will add Teal support to your package loader, meaning that require() will be able to run .tl files. Introduction You can read the tutorial chapter of the Teal documentation to get started with an overview of the language. Installing Via LuaRocks Install Lua and LuaRocks, then run: luarocks install tl This should put a tl command in your $PATH (run eval $(luarocks path) if the LuaRocks-installed binaries are not in your $PATH). Teal works with Lua 5.1-5.4, including LuaJIT. Binaries Alternatively, you can find pre-compiled binaries for Linux x86_64 and Windows x86_64 at the releases page. The packages contain a stand-alone executable that can run Teal programs (without the need of a separate Lua installation) and also compile them to Lua. Try it from your browser You can give Teal a try directly from your browser with the Teal Playground! It compiles Teal into Lua using Fengari, a Lua VM implemented in JavaScript, so everything runs on the client. Running Using the compiler directly Once tl is in your path, there are a few subcommands: tl run script.tl will run a Teal script. tl check module.tl will type check a Teal module, report any errors and quit. tl gen module.tl will check for syntax errors and generate a module.lua file in plain Lua with all type annotations stripped. tl warnings will list all warnings the compiler can generate. tl also supports some compiler options. These can either be specified on the command line or inside a tlconfig.lua file at the root of your project. Building projects with Cyan To build whole projects, you probably won't want to run tl on each file individually. We recommend using Cyan, the build tool designed for Teal. Loading Teal code from Lua You can either pre-compile your .tl files into .lua, or you can add the tl.lua module into your project and activate the Teal package loader: local tl = require("tl") tl.loader() Once the package loader is activated, your require() calls can load and compile .tl files on-the-fly. Documentation You can read the rendered documentation online; it can also be generated locally from the files in the docs/ folder of this repository. Type definitions tl supports declaration files, which can be used to annotate the types of third-party Lua libraries. We have a collaborative repository for declaration files at https://github.com/teal-language/teal-types — check it out and make your contribution! Text editor support Teal language support is currently available for Vim, Visual Studio Code, lite with linter support and Helix with LSP support. Community Join the chat on Gitter! You can also join via Matrix at #teal-language_community:gitter.im Teal is a project started by Hisham Muhammad, developed by a growing number of contributors and is written using Teal itself! License License is MIT, the same as Lua.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

11 sources
> There is no interpreter or VM, all of the code is converted directly into native machine code. This means you can expect better efficiency than Lua. However, this also means that Nelua cannot load code generated at runtime. The user is encouraged to generate code at compile-time using the preprocessor. Sounds like this is less like Typescript (take the "base" language, add typechecking, and then "transpile" back into the base language) and more like Crystal (take the "base" language, and create a separate language that's similar to it but with static types and AOT compilation) If you're looking for something more in the Typescript "transpiler" vein, there's Teal (https://github.com/teal-language/tl), written by the guy who created LuaRocks (and htop, interestingly). It still seems a little "early" in its life; it supports most everythin
Read the rest
g you'd need, including some support for Typescript-style "type declaration files" for third-party libs, but it lacks the nice distribution mechanism Typescript grew over time for shipping/installing those declaration files (right now just have to "vendor" them yourself).
In Nelua Programming Language
> I personally DO use Lua sometimes to code general purpose stuff. Speaking of general purpose application programming, you might be interested in my new(ish) project Teal: https://github.com/teal-language/tl It's a statically typed dialect of Lua, which is compatible with all modern Lua versions. The core compiler itself is one tl.lua file which can be added to any Lua project, and includes a Lua package loader that makes Lua's `require()` support .tl files, and there's also a tl CLI for generating .lua from .tl files.
In Lua and Python (2020)
I've seen a few comments mentioning the lack of static type checking, so I think this is probably a good time to mention my new(ish) project Teal: https://github.com/teal-language/tl It's a statically typed dialect of Lua, which is compatible with all modern Lua versions. The core compiler itself is one tl.lua file which can be added to any Lua project, and includes a Lua package loader that makes Lua's `require()` support .tl files, and there's also a tl CLI for generating .lua from .tl files.
In Lua, a Misunderstood Language
Lua is a bit weird and I think it's actually the strong point in favour of Lua (besides the obvious: nice performance and great portability). We need more variability to explore different ways to achieve our goals and to suit widest range of preferences. I'd love to see a big and strong standard library for the language to see it used for wider variety of tasks. In my extremely limited experience with Lua, the only thing that I definitely didn't like was its weak-ish dynamic typing, so I'd been keeping my eye on tl[1] and wu-lan[2] which both transpile to Lua for a while. 1. https://github.com/teal-language/tl 2. https://github.com/wu-lang/wu
In Lua and Python (2020)

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