(With credit to Chris for the subject name 😏) Some of you may know that over the last 2-3 months I've been looking into ways to add more control over how the compiler handles renaming and exporting APIs in the generated JS. Ideally, my work would have culminated in a variety of options that would allow release builds to be much smaller, if you were willing to sacrifice certain capabilities (things along the lines of dynamic access of properties and reflection). Obviously, you would have been able to keep things working the same as they do today, so my changes would have been opt-in.
I've determined that Closure does not actually expose the ability to prevent renaming of JS APIs, except by exporting them. The advanced compiler APIs that Closure exposes to prevent renaming are specifically intended for compiling multiple related projects together (like we're doing with modules). Additionally, I discovered that Closure does not guarantee that any custom rename mappings will be respected. In fact, the documentation says they may be completely ignored, and there is official guidance that says not to do what I was originally trying to do. I could not find any other Closure compiler APIs accessible in Java that could do what we want here, so I think that our original assumption that preventing renaming programmatically would be possible was incorrect. In the case of disabling exports, I found that there are parts of the Royale framework that rely on the fact that properties are exported. Bindings and setting properties in MXML are the most visible. There are probably more that I didn't discover yet because the first two had such a big impact. Honestly, I am not experienced enough in the framework side of Royale to know that I won't break anything if I try to start making changes to ensure that all framework code can handle property renaming. Maybe disabling exports is still possible, but I don't think that I'm the one who can do it. In the end, I was left feeling extremely frustrated with Closure compiler once again. It's not the first time, and it's unlikely to be the last. I wasted two whole months trying to follow its incredibly strict rule system. In the past, I have tried to fight Closure instead, so I thought that I was doing things right this time. I really wish I would have spent that time doing something else that would have benefitted Royale more. Side note: As I was reverting the rename/export changes I had made to the compiler, I realized that there were some issues with my previous attempts to improve the situation with warn-public-vars. With that in mind, I reverted those changes too (for now). I plan to look into a better solution for warn-public-vars soon, but I can't guarantee that anything will work because it's another place where Closure compiler is the cause of the issue. -- Josh Tynjala Bowler Hat LLC <https://bowlerhat.dev>
