Teal Support

Teal support ships built-in to lde. Any .tl files in your src dir will automatically be compiled ahead of time to lua into your target directory.

Quickstart

1. Run this and cd into it:

lde new --language teal ./hello-teal

The scaffold writes src/init.tl as the entry point, adds a check script to lde.json so lde check runs the Teal compiler’s checker, and drops in a tlconfig.lua with target/ on the include path.

2. Replace src/init.tl with:

local greet = require("hello-teal.greet")

local count: integer = 41
print(greet("world") .. " — " .. tostring(count + 1))

3. Make src/greet.tl:

local function greet(name: string): string
	return "hello, " .. name
end

return greet

4. Run it with lde run

The output is:

hello, world — 42

The file src/init.tl is the entry point. This is the same as src/init.lua for packages that use Lua.

Type checking with tl check

Every Teal package — including dependencies — keeps its .tl sources in target/ next to the compiled .lua files. That lets the Teal compiler’s own checker resolve require(...) against your dependencies with full type info:

tl check -I target src/init.tl

Or add the directory to your tlconfig.lua:

return {
	include_dir = { "target" },
}

Wire it up as a project script so lde check runs the checker — lde builds the package first, so target/ is always up to date:

{
	"scripts": {
		"check": "tl check -I target src/init.tl src/greet.tl"
	}
}

lde check

List every .tl file in src/ you want checked (add new ones as you create them), and make sure the tl CLI is on your PATH. The script is just a shell command executed from the package root, so lde run check works too.

The checker looks up require("mylib.foo") as target/mylib/foo.tl (or .d.tl), so your own modules and every dependency’s modules type-check from target/. Only the compiled .lua files ever end up in lde bundle / lde compile output — the preserved .tl sources are never bundled.