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by klibertp 1938 days ago
Not a comment about try.haxe, but Haxe in general:

There's this Window Manager called Awesome, which is scripted with Lua/LuaJIT. It features an extensive library of objects for use in user scripts.

There's a lot to like about Lua, but it's designed as an embedded scripting language and it gets harder to use the more code you have. Extremely dynamic nature coupled with lack of good tooling makes it really hard to explore the codebases above a certain level of complexity.

Enter Haxe, which has Lua as one of its targets. It gives you static typing (with local type inference), good LSP support for navigating the codebase, some nice libraries and utilities (Tinkerbell) that Lua lacks, macros, exceptions, modules, basically everything you'd need to work with a large codebase. Everything Lua does is still accessible, so for example coroutines and tail call elimination are still working, but you get a lot of tools on top of that.

I think LuaJIT + Haxe is a very powerful combination, which gives you great performance, rapid prototyping, and tools for programming in the large at the same time. The experience of writing a few kloc of Lua scripts for Awesome was not the most pleasant, but when I added Haxe to the mix, it became a real pleasure to work with. It's worth considering if you find yourself in a similar situation (a lot of things are scripted with Lua, after all.)

2 comments

I have evaluated several "typed Lua" solutions[1]. Haxe might be a bit too heavy-weight depending on what you try to do. There're Teal and TypeScriptToLua which might be a better fit.

[1] https://ruoyusun.com/2021/01/31/typed-lua.html

I recently did a fairly large undertaking with TypescriptToLua.

(Porting the Lua API + types of a major music DAW to TS types to make it possible to write type-checked scripts in JS/TS).

The experience was mostly smooth, barring a few bumps of non-standard TS stuff. (It's also very actively developed)

BUT, the community is amazing. They have a Discord server where the core devs are active and very helpful, they quickly and politely helped me fix the small issues I ran into.

I never knew Haxe was capable of this, so I can't give a fair assessment, but now I am interested in trying it as well!

-----

If you want to check out what I did:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=247666

https://github.com/GavinRay97/reaper-with-typescript-starter

https://i.imgur.com/yaoBDvb.gif

At the time I started working on my scripts - sometime in 2019 - I think neither Teal, nor TSToLua existed. Not 100% sure about that, but I remember searching for type systems for Lua and coming back empty handed back then :(

I'll take a closer look at both, they seem interesting.

Wow, I feel like somehow the universe directed me to this comment. I've been using Awesome for almost a year now, but with mostly default settings because writing Lua is such a chore. I'm gonna look into this right now, and appreciate any more information you're willing to share about your setup.

Thank you!!

My config is on Github[0] and it's an absolute mess: at first I used plain Lua, then tried MoonScript (which was a huge let down, unfortunately), then switched to Haxe. In all 3 cases this config was my first time using the languages in question, so the code is... less than ideal, let's leave it at that :)

If you want to set up something similar, you can start with haxeshigh/Makefile[1] and haxeshigh/bin/build (it's a shell script). In the haxeshigh/src/ there are implementations of three widgets: battery, brightness, and taglist[2]. The last one is the most complex as it uses coroutines to animate (slide in/out) the widget on screen. The rest of src/ are wrappers/type definitions for objects from Awesome, plus some macros/helpers for working with Lua tables (which are both arrays and hash tables at the same time, Haxe doesn't like this).

I found some bugs in the Lua part of the Haxe compiler (genlua.ml), but it was a long time ago, so they are probably fixed already. I don't remember the details, but the fix was trivial... I'll try to look for the issue and see if it's already fixed later.

[0] https://github.com/piotrklibert/awesome-config

[1] https://github.com/piotrklibert/awesome-config/blob/master/h...

[2] https://github.com/piotrklibert/awesome-config/blob/master/h...