What is the present situation / compatibility with Teal and PUC Lua 5.5?

[kevin-kmetz]

Hi all! I'm a returning user of Teal (last used 2 years ago) and am considering using it in a project that will utilize PUC Lua 5.5 (am presently prototyping an embedded static PUC Lua wrapping and orchestrating layer over static raylib and other supporting C libraries to make an engine focused on browser-first 3d games via Emscripten, deliberately not using LuaJIT). I'm not necessarily committed to using 5.5's new features and so am open to dropping down to 5.4.

I'm wondering, what is the official word on how compatible Teal is with PUC Lua 5.5? Is it mostly compatible, with perhaps work being needed to accommodate new features? Is it entirely compatible? Incompatible?

I've tried finding this info in the usual places but nothing has bore fruit. I'm about to just download and start testing myself which is probably the best way to find out, but I'm curious what the official word / stance on the matter is. If 5.5 is too bumpy with Teal, I'll probably just bump my project and associated library down to using PUC Lua 5.4 to preserve use of Teal.

Thanks for any remarks and insight!

[Andre-LA]

There's some ongoing work on #1059

[kevin-kmetz]

Just to report back with what I found - I was able to use Teal files seamlessly in my program that used an embedded PUC Lua 5.5 VM to interface with raylib in browser after Emscripten compilation (both pre-compiled into Lua and loaded from .tl files at runtime). Reflecting on what I was asking, of course it was going to work - the new Lua 5.5 features only marginally extended the syntax, so the existing version of Teal obviously makes use of nearly all of the syntax of Lua 5.5 during its compilation already, and as Andre-LA pointed out above, there is ongoing work to loop the little bit of syntax changes (chiefly, the new named vararg syntax) into Teal syntax.

There was no apparent incompatibility that I saw, so I think it is fairly safe to conclude that Lua 5.5 doesn't "break" Teal in any noticeable way for most day-to-day use cases. Just remarking for posterity.