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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

Can this transpile type-annotated Luau code to just regular Lua code? I would like to add type checks to my Lua code but I dont want to run it in the Luau VM. I want to run it in PUC-Rio Lua, and LuaJIT. Something like Haxe[1], but not an entirely different programming language.

[1] https://haxe.org/

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There is Teal language that has type annotations and could output plain Lua: https://github.com/teal-language/tl

ooh neat

There is a transpiler in the source tree, but I expect it needs a polish pass. We haven't put it to use in quite some time.

In particular, I am pretty sure that it won't do the right thing when it encounters the extra syntax we've added to Luau. So far, that's an if-else expression and a continue keyword. Transpiling those accurately will take a bit of work.

Doubtful, but there is TypescriptToLua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Here's a whole list of languages that compile to Lua (many of them statically typed): https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

I highly doubt it. Most of the time with these forks they change/remove core language features instead of compiling down to plain lua.

It's worth noting that Luau is backwards compatible with Lua 5.1*, so I see no technical reason why transpilation wouldn't be possible.

* I'm tangentially aware of some RFCs to deprecate metatable related methods (setmetatable, getmetatable, rawset, etc), which may have an impact.

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