"Run" option

[CypherPotato]

Hello.

Firstly, thanks for Bflat. It's an incredible project that deserves attention.

I missed an option to just run C# code, without the need to build an executable for it. To achieve this, I made a small change to bflat that adds the "Run" command, which calls the Build command but with an output to a temporary path. After compiling, it executes the file, and at the end of the process, the compiler deletes the output files.

Demonstration:

C:\>echo System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!"); > file.cs

C:\>bflat run file.cs
Hello, world!

My question is: does it make sense to have this command? Do you think it is relevant for bflat to have this option built in or is it unnecessary?

[MichalStrehovsky]

Thanks!

For anything else than trivial programs, compiling is going to take seconds and it feels a bit wasteful to have a command that deletes it all. The advantage could be that we know what computer this is going to run on so it could imply '-m native'. I'll have to think about it more

[CypherPotato]

Even with -Os and -m native, the average compilation time for an hello world is around 20s, which is too high for this option.

De facto, bflat takes some time to compile and may not be suitable for just running code without saving it. The initial idea is to develop targeting the .net runtime in Visual Studio and then compile with BFlat, but it doesn't work very well because apparently bflat doesn't support json source generation and also reads the contents of files generated in obj/, which ends up failing the compilation.