Terra and Nelua are both very different in goals than Teal. Teal is literally gradual types integrated into Lua keeping as many of Lua's idioms as possible (to a fault[1]). Terra and Nelua are both very metaprogrammable systems programming languages. Nelua's goals are primarily to soften C's rough edges, comparable to something like Nim.
There's another one you missed in Pallene[2]. But again, it's goal was to optimize the stack sharing involved in using the C API. It also adds types though and maintains Lua idioms as much as possible.
Comments
There's many different approaches to typed Lua:
- https://luau-lang.org (interpreted / sandboxed)
- https://terralang.org (JIT interpreted)
- https://nelua.io (Lua -> C)
- https://typescripttolua.github.io/ (TS -> Lua)
- https://github.com/teal-language/tl (Teal -> Lua)
- https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server (IDE only typing)
With minimum effort you can get a lot of benefit from using Sumneko's Lua language server.
Terra and Nelua are both very different in goals than Teal. Teal is literally gradual types integrated into Lua keeping as many of Lua's idioms as possible (to a fault[1]). Terra and Nelua are both very metaprogrammable systems programming languages. Nelua's goals are primarily to soften C's rough edges, comparable to something like Nim.
There's another one you missed in Pallene[2]. But again, it's goal was to optimize the stack sharing involved in using the C API. It also adds types though and maintains Lua idioms as much as possible.
[1]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/discussions/339
[2]: https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene