A preview of a new QB64 option

[SMcNeill]

If you can see in the thumbnail there, we've added a new option to the start menu for "Run only (no exe)".  This option allows you to compile your file, run it, and then cleans it off your drive when it's finished.  I saw a request somewhere about compiling to temp files, and so I took a while to come up with this for us. 

Currently it's only in my personal fork of the repo, and I've only tested it and verified that it's working as intended for Windows.  Tomorrow I'll test to get it up and going for Linux (and hopefully Mac, though I don't have a Mac to test things on), and then I'll push it into our repo and it'll be one of the features added in to our next build release. 

[Coolman]

very good idea.

[Ikerkaz]

Great!!! It would be amazing if you could asign one key for that... F6 maybe? Shift+F5?

IKZ

[Pete]

Curious. Let's say I have pete.exe, a perfectly great file on my PC.

Oops, I finds one lil' bug.

Okay, so I'z opens pete.bas, fixes that thar bug, and hits Run, only bys mistake, cuz I'm a dumb idgit!

So -samlang aside, did I just murder the existing Pete bas, or some intermediary temp.exe that just never gets renamed as pete.bas?

So either of these two models reflective of the compilation method?

START =
pete.bas > ~temp.exe > pete.exe

RUN =
pete.bas > ~temp.exe > remove ~temp.exe (the orig pete.exe is left intact.)

or

START =
pete.bas > pete.exe

RUN =
pete.bas > pete.exe > remove pete.exe (the original pete.exe is now gone.)

----------------------------------

I would think the first model to be preferable, and maybe QB64 is set up that way with START, already. If not, it's more of a can of worms, and perhaps just a notation in the wiki about the possible loss of the existing .exe should be explained.

Like my mama told me, It's always something! (Oops, changing charters in mid post, again!)

Pete

PS Love this idea, no mater how it works out. It will be a real clutter saver! Kudos to you for adding it, and kudos to @dcromley for asking if this could be added.

[SMcNeill]

It works under this model:

RUN = pete.bas > pete.exe (the original pete.exe is now gone, just like usual)> run pete.exe > remove pete.exe

pete.bas is untouched, so if you -- being you -- kill pete.exe by accident, you'd just have to recompile the source properly.

[bplus]

So Run only is going to delete the old exe, even though you are just testing a change to the .bas

Well I guess not that different from Run always changing the exe. Exe's are expensive space wise and no sense cluttering up folders with exe's of proggies, sounds good.

[dcromley]

Wow, you guys are responsive!

[Dav]

Sounds cool.  I'm going to test it on my spotlight program, spot.bas -- yes, so I can See Spot Run. 

All kidding aside, thanks for pushing QB64 forward!

- Dav

[SMcNeill]

An image of another change which I'm working to push into the repo...  This one swaps out one of our old image loading libraries from a 2012 version to a 2022 version of the same library.  Notice the difference in the speed tests on thee two programs ran.  Each is loading and freeing a PNG image 100 times.

The old library takes 10 seconds for the task.
The new library takes 7 seconds for the task.

Working with PNG images should be about 30% faster in future releases, if these changes pass review and we don't go a different route for image handling. 

[crumpets]

This is cool! Will there be a command line option for losers like me that use a different IDE?