Generate types for TS interop

[Papipo]

Hi!

My use case is as follows: I implement game logic in the server using lua. I want to have some kind of contract with the FE (which will be written in TS). As long as I can describe a state payload to benefit from type checking and autocompletion when coding the FE I am fine.

So I can add types to the game modules and export them types using doc generation. I would then need to transform the JSON into TS types. Do you think this is feasible and sound? How stable is the exported JSON format?

Thanks!

[carsakiller]

You might be better off working the other way round using TypeScript to Lua

[Papipo]

But then I wouldn't be writing lua, which I love to do. And I'll lose the DSL-y capabilities of Lua.

Still, might be the best option. Feels a bit overkill to write TS to transform it to Lua to then run it on the Erlang VM, but other options feel like poor bandaids.

[Papipo]

I have tested T2Lua and the resulting code is disgusting. Debugging Luerl code is already painful.
For the sake of comparing I tried with haxe and from a 35 line script I got 1000 lines in lua. T2Lua at least generated a lua script of the same size of the original.

[CppCXY]

I believe that by using simple regular expressions, we can transform the TypeScript code into a hint file with luacats, which will provide better suggestions.

[Papipo]

I started writing a PoC and I realised that what I need is the opposite: the schema/types are driven by the needs of the frontend. So since I am writing the FE in TS, I hope that in the rich TS ecosystem I'll find some tool to do this.