LUA - ZeroBrane IDE: Compile feature

Question

in ZeroBrane Studio if I use "Project - complile (F7)" - what exactly does happen?
Will there be a standalone .exe created from my Lua code ?
And if so - in which directory ? I use Windows 10. (Couldn't find any information in the documention)

Answer 1

From what I see by a quick look into the source code it simply checks whether the code has any errors by loading it using loadstring which compiles the file. There is no output file, just some text output about any errors.

But that's just an assumption. Feel free to check if this is actually the function called when you click that button.

https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBraneStudio/blob/5daf55d79449431ca9794f6b8a65476dc203b780/src/editor

function CompileProgram(editor, params)
  local params = {
    jumponerror = (params or {}).jumponerror ~= false,
    reportstats = (params or {}).reportstats ~= false,
    keepoutput = (params or {}).keepoutput,
  }
  local doc = ide:GetDocument(editor)
  local filePath = doc:GetFilePath() or doc:GetFileName()
  local loadstring = loadstring or load
  local func, err = loadstring(StripShebang(editor:GetTextDyn()), '@'..filePath)
  local line = not func and tonumber(err:match(":(%d+)%s*:")) or nil

  if not params.keepoutput then ClearOutput() end

  compileTotal = compileTotal + 1
  if func then
    compileOk = compileOk + 1
    if params.reportstats then
      ide:Print(TR("Compilation successful; %.0f%% success rate (%d/%d).")
        :format(compileOk/compileTotal*100, compileOk, compileTotal))
    end
  else
    ide:GetOutput():Activate()
    ide:Print(TR("Compilation error").." "..TR("on line %d"):format(line)..":")
    ide:Print((err:gsub("\n$", "")))
    -- check for escapes invalid in LuaJIT/Lua 5.2 that are allowed in Lua 5.1
    if err:find('invalid escape sequence') then
      local s = editor:GetLineDyn(line-1)
      local cleaned = s
        :gsub('\\[abfnrtv\\"\']', '  ')
        :gsub('(\\x[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F])', function(s) return string.rep(' ', #s) end)
        :gsub('(\\%d%d?%d?)', function(s) return string.rep(' ', #s) end)
        :gsub('(\\z%s*)', function(s) return string.rep(' ', #s) end)
      local invalid = cleaned:find("\\")
      if invalid then
        ide:Print(TR("Consider removing backslash from escape sequence '%s'.")
          :format(s:sub(invalid,invalid+1)))
      end
    end
    if line and params.jumponerror and line-1 ~= editor:GetCurrentLine() then
      editor:GotoLine(line-1)
    end
  end

  return func ~= nil -- return true if it compiled ok
end