I don't think Teal can be total. Lua is super expressive and you would need to get deep into dependent types and whatnot to caption a fraction of the power of its types.
> Some Lua libraries use complex dynamic types that can't be easily represented in Teal. In those cases, using any and making explicit casts is our last resort.
Personally if I paid the cost of having an extra compile step then I would rather wish for some serious type safety like what Elm or Reason provide. But then you end up with a different language.
I agree though that for your use case of making complicated libraries Teal might be actually good fit.
I was going to argue that Luau is superior anyway if you really can't cope with annotations but obviously if you want to make libraries for lua users that doesn't work. (Though I guess you could technically compile down from Luau to Lua, just not sure if anyone has ever bothered.)
> Some Lua libraries use complex dynamic types that can't be easily represented in Teal. In those cases, using any and making explicit casts is our last resort.
https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/master/docs/tutoria...
Personally if I paid the cost of having an extra compile step then I would rather wish for some serious type safety like what Elm or Reason provide. But then you end up with a different language.
I agree though that for your use case of making complicated libraries Teal might be actually good fit.
I was going to argue that Luau is superior anyway if you really can't cope with annotations but obviously if you want to make libraries for lua users that doesn't work. (Though I guess you could technically compile down from Luau to Lua, just not sure if anyone has ever bothered.)