title: Statically typed Lua
body: <p>I am looking for a Lua front-end compiler that is type-checked at compile time, but outputs standard Lua 5.1 byte-code (that has only run-time types).  What I want is a decent amount of static, compile-time syntactic analysis and optional typing, to detect trivial errors sooner than run-time.  The resulting byte-code would have to play nicely with existing Lua byte-code that was compiled with the standard LoadString().</p>
  
  <p>To be clear -- any difference would only occur at byte-compilation time.  At runtime, the byte code would have no idea that anything different/unusual happened to it during the compile phase.</p>
  
  <p>What I have in mind sounds a lot like ActionScript; I wouldn't even mind an ActionScript compiler that outputs Lua byte code!</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone heard of such an effort?  I've seen some references to using MetaLua to do this, but honestly I am not bright enough to make heads of tails of their documentation</p>