Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2024

schedule

Five years of Teal: minimalism versus growth in language design


Teal is a typed dialect of Lua whose genesis was chronicled in three talks at this devroom: "Minimalism versus types" (2019), "Minimalistic typed Lua is here" (2020) and "What's Next for Teal" (2021). From a being just a wild idea back in 2019, the language has grown into a small community of users (roughly measured by its ~1.8k GitHub stars). With growth, the language's strengths and weaknesses became more evident, and with those come feature requests. How to keep the language small and still address the needs of users, while remaining faithful to the spirit of Lua and not falling into pitfalls from the past? In this talk we'll discuss some pragmatic choices in Teal's design that were made to balance those concerns: to make it more powerful, while keeping it small.

Speakers

Photo of Hisham Muhammad Hisham Muhammad

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