Wow, congrats! I just posted above about deciding on Fennel over Urn. Have you checked out Lumen? What are your thoughts on it compared with Fennel? I want to choose one to work on my own type of game dev, live coding toy experiments.
I've looked briefly at Lumen. I don't do any JS work, so cross-compiling to JS doesn't really appeal to me personally. I would expect that compiling to two targets would make it more difficult to implement clean, readable compiler output the way Fennel does, but I haven't checked.
The docs for Lumen are a bit sparse, but it looks like it doesn't make globals opt-in or make you flag locals as mutable the way Fennel does. IME calling these things out explicitly makes certain kinds of bugs easier to catch. Fennel also allows for optional arity checks on functions.
I would expect that Lumen's keyword arguments would cause some complication when interoperating with Lua, which doesn't have them. In addition, cross-compiling to both JS and Lua means that it can't seamlessly support multiple return values, which are used pervasively in 3rd-party Lua libraries.
As I mentioned elsewhere, Fennel can run in the browser with Fengari, but it's a very different approach because Fengari includes a full Lua VM. This means there's some overhead to load the VM (~220kb) but once it's loaded you get access to coroutines, which are a much nicer way to code non-blocking functions than callbacks.
But these are just my initial uninformed impressions.
I am going to try Fennel, specifically look over your work on Fennel and the game you did. I am sure it will speak tons to my questions. I can always try and duplicate efforts in Lumen if I really want to know for myself if it is a good fit for me and my needs. Thanks!
