1.4 Building an executable application

1.4.1 Building Reversi

To build an executable application for a project, choose Project > Build in its project window.

: 1. Choose Project > Build in the Reversi project window.
: Functional Developer starts building the application. A progress indicator window appears.

Figure 1.5 The build progress indicator.

Because we have never built the Reversi application before, Functional Developer examines and compiles every source file. When compilation is finished, it links the compiled files together with the system libraries that the application uses, and creates an executable file. Before it does that, however, a dialog appears.

Figure 1.6 The link warning dialog.

The dialog appears to let us know that the compiler issued serious warnings while compiling the project sources, and to let us choose whether to go ahead with the "link" phase of building. The "link" phase creates the executable application for the project.

Why are there serious warnings? Recall from Section 1.3 that we will be adding some more source files to the project later on. These files implement new game features that require debugging and will help to demonstrate the Functional Developer development environment further. Because we built the project without adding the extra files, the compiler detected that some code in the project refers to name bindings that were otherwise undefined, and issued the serious warnings.

If there are serious warnings when compiling a project, we will usually want to fix the code first before trying to run the application. But sometimes it is useful to be able to execute an application that is only partly finished. As long as we know that the code containing the references to the undefined bindings is not going to be executed, we can safely test the rest of the application.

Reversi has been carefully coded to avoid calling these undefined names until the files containing their definitions are included in the project and the project is rebuilt. So there is no harm in building an executable for Reversi.

If we click Yes in the link warning dialog, an executable is created; if we click No, building stops. In either case, the serious warnings are recorded in the project window's Warnings page.

: 2. Click Yes in the link warning dialog.
: Functional Developer links an executable for Reversi.