Starter Kit for AO Application Development with Teal

This starter kit includes tooling that allows application developers on AO to use Teal - Lua with strong typing.

It allows for a workflow similar to that in web development with Typescript, while catering to the requirements of AO (to have a single .lua output file to be loaded into an AO process)

How to Use

1. luarocks install tl && luarocks install cyan
2. Write your code in Teal (using .tl files)
3. Add your modules into the Squishy file (used to generate the final amalgamation)
4. Use npm run build to create your main.lua output

How It Works

Teal is a superset of Lua that allows for typed programming in Lua.

Teal relates to Lua as Typescript relates to Javascript.

Cyan is the official build tool for teal.

Squish is a tool that allows for the amalgamation of multiple Lua files into a single Lua file.

This project seeks to provide a workflow similar to that in web development with Typescript, while catering to the requirements of AO (to have a single .lua output file to be loaded into an AO process via AOform/Aoconnect)

AO-native modules and state

Two aspects about AO need to be considered:

1. Native modules like "ao", "json" ...
2. Native global state like ao, Handlers, ...

This project includes an ao type definition for ao globals.

Adding more type definitions

It's possible to include type definitions for external packages, similar to the type definitions in Typescript.

See the Teal docs for more information.

Many packages already have existing type definitions: See the Teal-types repo for more information.

You can grab a type defintion from there and place it into src//typedefs

For developer convenience this starter kit includes ao-native global state type definitions. See src/ao.d.tl for details.

Using you own Lua modules

If you wish to use packages/modules that are not natively typed you can place the lua file alongside a teal type defintion inside packages//

You can then require them inside your teal project as usual via require("yourmodule.yourfile"). Teal will use the type definition for checks while copying the actual lua file during the build process.

To prevent Cyan from pruning these packages, add them into tlconfig.lua under the dont_prune section. Otherwise Cyan will warn about foreign files in the build dir and even prune/delete them if ran with the --prune flag.

Amalgamations

For easier development we use squishy to produce a single output file in lua. Add your modules into the squishy file to configure this (optional).

Batteries included

This project includes a Teal bint implementation with typing support and increased type safety for big integer math and also a teal native implementation of the ao utils.