It may not be official, but TypeScript support is pretty wonderful: https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang... :)

This takes me back. Whilst I was studying at university, I developed Heimdall, open source firmware flashing software for Samsung Android phones. I don't know that it was ever official, but I remember being pretty stoked when I realised some Mozilla employees were using Heimdall to flash Firefox OS onto Samsung devices: https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_...

I'm working on tooling to turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans for video production and hands on crafts.

For older kids I've been making it easier to write games in Godot using TypeScript:

https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...

I'm building tooling using this technology which allows kids to create their own games, this is itself presented as a game kids can play through. Basically, imagine if Roblox actually delivered on its promises to kids.

Most of what we're building will be open sourced, so that older kids / young adults will be able export their projects and share their creations stand-alone.

Of course, telling kids they can create their own game is only relevant is kids want to do that. We're not locked into one way of thinking. We've also modified Overcooked 2, a traditionally co-op game and introduced a visual scripting platform which allows kids to code their way through levels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ackD3G_D2Hc

Overcooked 2 won't be the only game for which we do this. Introducing coding to existing games is a fun way to teach kids to code, without yet burdening kids with too much creative freedom. Kids already want to play these games, so this approach allows us to bring educational tooling to kids rather than vice versa.

I used to be Head of Engineering at Ender, where we ran custom Minecraft servers for kids: https://joinender.com/ and prior to that I was Head of Engineering at Prequel / Beta Camp, where we ran courses that helped teenagers learn about entrepreneurship: https://www.beta.camp/. During peak COVID I also ran a social emotion development book subscription service with my wife, a primary school teacher.

You can get pretty far by bolting annotations onto Lua (no compilation step), for example using my IDE:

https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

Admittedly, I've been focused on some other things recently, but still with some focus on type safety e.g. https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...

> especially for something like a video codec

Why especially video decoders?

> I wonder if they really care or if this is one of those "we don't want to use Rust because of silly reasons and here's are reasonable-sounding but actually irrelevant technical justification"...

I would have thought video decoders are specifically one of the few cases where performance really is important enough to trump language guaranteed security. They're widely deployed, and need to work in a variety of environments; everything from low power mobile devices to high-throughput cloud infrastructure. They also need to be low latency for live broadcast/streaming.

That's not to say security isn't a concern. It absolutely is, especially given the wide variety of deployment targets. However, video decoders aren't something that necessarily need to continually evolve over time. If you prioritize secure coding practices and pair that with some formal/static analysis, then you ought to be able to squeeze out more performance than Rust. For example, Rust may be inserting bounds checks on repeated access — where as a C program could potentially validate this sort of information just the once up front and pass the "pre-validated" data structure around (maybe even across threads) "knowing" that it's valid data. Yes, there's a security risk involved, but it may be worth it.