You might be interested in Teal ("the typescript for Lua") https://github.com/teal-language/tl

https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/master/docs/tutoria...

You can send a PR!

We ran >200k lines of Lua for a 3d game at >60fps. We could not do allocations on the hotpath, or we would run out of our frame budget (which was around 1ms). Games are very hard to auto-test when not built with that in mind from the ground up, so any change to the code might unknowingly break any caller, and we would only know for sure once the game runs. Sadly the code base is 20 years old.

At some point (2.1?) LuaJIT added a peephole interpreter optimization which can follow a simple constructed table for awhile, and if it's never stored, the values it's conveying are just put on the stack.

I'm pretty fearless with creating transient tables, and run enough profiling to be moderately confident that the allocation sink is keeping that from providing memory pressure.

There's a larger thing here about the JIT being temperamental and having to kind of learn its moods, but: it's faster as an interpreter than other choices by a matter of multiples, and when the JIT works, it positively screams.

I once added vector4 as a primitive type in my fork of Lua (to avoid allocations altogether) - it was surprisingly easy to add, took me a weekend.