Particle Dev: "build didn't produce binary"

Troubleshooting
15

I guess we know that Particle Dev is still in development so we can expect a few hiccups. Everything was going fine and then I got the dreaded

`"(!) build didn’t produce binary Error: Command…"

If I clicked on it, it reported at the top of the page:

 "There were no compile errors"

It was a large file and I wasted a bunch of time; eventually, as suggested above, I used the command line compile which helped identify a typo.

I managed to replicate the phenomenon in a small file, as follows:

// Function prototypes
int myFunction(String foo);

void setup() {
    Serial.begin(115200);
    Particle.function("myFunction", myFunction);
}

void loop() {
}

int aFunction(String foo) {
  Serial.println(foo);
  return 1;
}

Note the “typo”: myFunction(), listed as a function prototype, doesn’t match aFunction() declared later. It works of course if aFunction() is changed to myFunction().

The point is that Particle Dev won’t build a binary but doesn’t find an error. How do I flag this for the development guys?

My advice to others is that if you get a “build didn’t produce a binary” go immediately to command line compile for extensive warnings and error messages.