This project comes from the desire of a practical Lua dialect for programming-in-the-large. This is inspired by the experiences working on two large Lua applications.
The goal of the language is to be a dialect of Lua as much as TypeScript is a
dialect of JavaScript. So yes, it is on the one hand a different language
(there are new keywords such as global for example) but on the other hand it
is pretty much recognizable, as you said, as "Lua + typing".
It aims to integrate to pretty much any Lua environment, since it's a "transpiler" that generates plain Lua and has no dependencies. The goal is to support at least both the latest PUC-Rio Lua and the latest LuaJIT as output targets.
Minimalism (for some vague definition of minimalism!) is a design goal for both conceptual and practical reasons: conceptually to match the nature of Lua, and practical so that I can manage developing it. :)
My very first concrete goal for Teal's development was to have the compiler typecheck itself; that was achieved already: Teal is written in Teal.
The next big goal is to have it typecheck the source code of a complete Lua application such as LuaRocks. That's something I wanted since the Typed Lua days back in 2015. That's a big goal and once I get there I'll dare call this "production ready", since it's used in a real-world program, though it should be usable even before we get there! The language has already proven useful when creating a new Lua module.
Teal is being created in hopes it will be useful for myself and hopefully others. I'm trying to keep it small and long-term manageable, and would love to see a community of users and contributors grow around it over time!