Pallene

https://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/Gualandi-2020-SCP.pdf

With the insight that programmers are willing to restrict their use of dynamic language features when performance matters, we have decided to explore a return to the traditional scripting architecture through Pallene, a system programming language that we have designed specifically to complement Lua. Since Pallene has static types, it can obtain good performance with an ahead-of-time compiler, avoiding the complexities of just-in-time compilation; and since it is designed specifically to be used with Lua, we hope Pallene will be attractive in situations where using C would be too cumbersome.

Overall, our goals for Pallene are that it should be safe, predictably efficient, seamlessly interoperable with Lua, and easy for Lua programmers to learn. Furthermore, it should have a simple and maintainable implementation that is as portable as Lua itself. achieve these goals, we designed Pallene as an ahead-of-time-compiled, typed subset of Lua, which can directly manipulate Lua data structures, which shares Lua’s runtime and garbage collector...

Inspired by optional and gradual typing, Pallene is very close to a typed subset of Lua

https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene , looks like development may be paused

via @akkartik