# Introduction

## Welcome to Teal!

This book is the primary source of documentation for the Teal programming
language.

Teal is a statically-typed dialect of [Lua](https://www.lua.org). It extends
Lua with type annotations, allowing you to specify arrays, maps and records,
as well as interfaces, union types and generics.

It aims to fill a niche similar to that of TypeScript in the JavaScript world,
but adhering to Lua's spirit of minimalism, portability and embeddability.

Is it implemented as a compiler, [tl](https://github.com/teal-language/tl),
which compiles `.tl` source code into `.lua` files.
