Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua?
Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available.
The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.
I would like to understand the motivations for building another programming language when in fact, firstly, a lot of code is being written by Claude and the like, and secondly, the existing languages and low level options like C, Assembly have become more accessible now thanks to AI coding tools.
Yet another programming language. Why not invest the time into fixing other languages? Is it really so important to have _that_ keyword and not having _that_ `;`? There are enough languages for probably all tasks.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] thread> Embed/extend in C
Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua?
Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available.
There have been some attempts:
Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)
Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)
Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)
Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)
The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.
Both colon and {... why? And it seems very mixed in the example.
I see this so often in new languages, making poor choices seemingly only to distinguish themselves from existing languages