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Comment by pansa2 | Hacker News Reader

QuickJS is presumably intended for embedding within applications - how does it compare to Lua for this?

Both languages are fairly quirky - at least JavaScript’s quirks are widely-known. But how do the implementations compare in terms of API, robustness, portability, performance etc?

Also, I’m not aware of any static typing add-ons for Lua, but presumably it’s possible to use TypeScript with QuickJS?

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> ...but presumably it’s possible to use TypeScript with QuickJS?

I don't see why not, since TS compiles down to JS. The engine doesn't know or care about what kind of transformations the code went through before it was JS. You might need to be careful about compatibility, the QuickJS intro says 'Almost complete ES2023 support", so you'd have to avoid any unsupported features.

Teal (https://github.com/teal-language/tl) is the closest we have from a "TypeScript for Lua". It is natively supported by many projects now, including game engines such as the Bevy scripting plugin and Defold.

Oh, interesting. Thanks!

> Also, I’m not aware of any static typing add-ons for Lua

I'd not cal TypeScript an addon to JS. It's a language that transpiles to JS (and so does CoffeScript, Elm, etc. etc.)

There are many language projects that transpile to Lua:

https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages?tab=readme-ov-fi...

On the other hand, my understanding is that the transformations the TS compiler does to the code is just stripping annotations, so it's not unreasonable to call it an add-on.

Sure call it what you like. Just know that it's very different from a Firefox add-on.

It’s a strict superset

Thanks, there are many more there than I expected!

Luau is a gradually typed version of Lua at least.

I have been using TypeScript for quite sometime but it's my first time learning of one gradually typed language. I always decribed TypeScript as optionally statically typed

Doesn’t Luau require a custom Lua implementation though? Is that implementation easily embeddable like the regular Lua VM?

Yes, and yes. There are libraries for embedding lua in rust programs that allow you to trivially switch between Lua, LuaJIT, and Luau.

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