Teal

Teal is a typed dialect of Lua. To get familiar with Teal, please have a look at Teal Tutorial.

Using teal in your project (Defold 1.8.1+)

1. Add a dependency on a latest release of this extension: https://github.com/defold/extension-teal/tags

   

2. Fetch Libraries (Project → Fetch Libraries)

3. Create tlconfig.lua file in the project root with the following content:

   return {
        gen_target = "5.1",
        gen_compat = "off",
        include = {"**/*.tl"}
   }
   

4. Create .tl files — those can be required from scripts and lua modules as if they were .lua files

Examples

Hello world

With Teal extension added to the project dependency list and /tlconfig.lua file in the project root, we can start using teal. Assuming you are using an empty project template to try it out, here is how you can start using it:

1. Create a file in the main folder and name it greeter.tl, then write the following code:

   -- this is Teal, note the type annotations:
   local template: string = "Hello, %s!"
   
   local M = {}
   
   function M.greet(s: string): string
      return template:format(s)
   end
   
   return M
   

2. Create main.script file in the main directory, set it's content to this:

   -- we are importing the Teal file as if it was Lua
   local greeter = require("main.greeter")
   
   function init(self)
       -- use the Teal module
       print(greeter.greet("Teal"))
   end
   

3. In main.collection file, add a main.script Script as a component to some game object.
4. Run the game. The build process will compile and type check all Teal code, and you will see the following line in the output:

   DEBUG:SCRIPT: Hello, Teal!
   

Developing this extension

If you modify teal executable, re-assemble the bin zips:

./make-binaries.sh

If you modify extension code (Java), recompile the jar before commit:

./build_plugin.sh