I’m getting close to the release of my app and I’m starting to think about some things related.
I would like to have the option for minified code to have package, class and members renamed at compile time. I have two reasons for this: 1. Obfuscation. As it stands, it’s pretty easy to take minified code from FlexJS and reconstruct the original code with the original structure and naming. Everything is @exported and easily readable. I’d like to have a method to rename everything to something completely unintelligible. 2. Code size. I was not sure how much package paths would effect code size, so I just did an experiment. I renamed every package path in my app to a much shorter version (i.e. org.apache.flex.core becomes fxc, etc.) I did not spend the time renaming class names or class member names. Just shortening the package paths resulted in a reduction of 509KB to 505KB after gzipping. (Prior to gzipping the reduction was 53 KB.) Class names and member names are a significant percentage of the remaining code, so it stands to reason that renaming those will result in a further reduction of code size. To be clear: obfuscation is a much bigger drive for me than code size. Code size is just an added plus. I was thinking of ideas on how to accomplish this goal. One idea was to enable some kind of metadata (or comments) in the code that the compiler could interpret to rewrite the names Another idea was some kind of mapping file that serves the same purpose. This is something that should be enabled via a compiler option. The challenge would be with library code in a swc. Since it’s already compiled to JS, it would be much harder to rename things unless it would work using find/replace. It seems to me that it would be more reliable if done while walking the tree and packages, classes and members could each be handled explicitly. Thoughts? Harbs
