In opposite to most other Lua implementations OOBD does not use the ASCII source code directly, for performance reason it loads precompiled Lua files instead.

These precompiled files are generated by the luac compiler, which is part of the lua package. But this luac compiler has one big disadvantage, as it totally ignores include commands in the source files, and it's quite disappointing to always add all these different dependencies by hand to the build process.

To automate this, olp was written. It just reads the initial source file, identifies the dofile() commands in it, reads also recursively the files to include and finally writes the whole source tree as one single text to stdout, where it can be picked up by the luac compiler and compiled to a single binary, containing all dependencies.