🌴 Kailua

Kailua is an experimental type checker and integrated development environment (IDE) for the Lua programming language (currently only Lua 5.1 is supported).

The detailed documentation is available here.

Usage

Kailua can be used as an IDE support for Visual Studio Code. Install Kailua by typing ext install kailua from the Quick Launch (Ctrl-P). If you are not on Windows, you should also install the standalone checker first.

You will see a warning that the configuration file is missing when you open a folder containing Lua codes. You need it for real-time checking.


You can either create .vscode/kailua.json by hand, or search "Kailua" from the Command Palette (Ctrl-Shift-P) to edit one.


The following content is required for .vscode/kailua.json, in case you are editing it by hand:

{
    "start_path": "<path to the entry point>",

    "preload": {
        // This indicates that we are using Lua 5.1 and all built-in libraries of it.
        "open": ["lua51"],
    },
}

You need to reload the current window (Ctrl-R or Cmd-R) to apply the configuration.

Once you've set the entry point, you can write your first Kailua code (simple, eh?):

print('Hello, world!')

Play a bit with this code to see which errors Kailua can detect.

Supported IDE Functions

• Real-time syntax checking (for all files).

• Real-time type checking, starting from given start path.

• Auto-completions for names and fields.

• Help for function signatures.

• Help for types of most subexpressions on hover.

• Go to definition for local and global names.

• Mass renaming of local and global names.