TypeScript to Lua Transpiler

I enjoy using https://love2d.org/ to make small games but I often hit a point where the codebase gets complex enough that I find myself wanting things like types and fancier editor features than any IDEs/editor plugins for Lua provide.

Biggest pain point was always having to check what properties exist on a given object. I love that Lua gives you enough power to add a prototype/object system at runtime but this means IDEs need to understand what you're doing to figure out what you want. You can do some metatable magic to error upon accessing undefined variables/properties but that's only doing anything at runtime.

On my current hobby project I decided to try out various typed versions of Lua and TypeScriptToLua is what stuck.

It was really cool being able to port my code over file by file, replacing weird custom lua objects with typescript classes (with a factory wrapper for unported Lua to use to instantiate an instance) and everything just smoothly working every step of the way. Now I get much more powerful linting and editing since I get to use the tooling people use for actual typescript.

I was worried the generated code would become unreadable but to my surprise it's not at all bad. I haven't done much benchmarking but also haven't noticed any performance impact. Whatever performance hit there is is more than worth it for the confidence the typechecker gives me in areas that are difficult to write tests for.