Endorkins

For a while now, I’ve been using FlashDevelop and CS3 exclusively for all of my AS3 development.  However, as my project became more and more complex, CS3 crashes became more frequent.  A few days ago, in fact, CS3 was crashing on every single compilation.  Very strange.

So, I looked into migrating my compilation to the Flex SDK.  After I got everything working, I noticed that my AS3-only (no imported Flex components) file sizes were much larger than those produced by CS3, even when compiled in FlashDevelop’s ‘Release’ mode.

After some tinkering, I discovered that the ‘verbose-stacktraces’ option increases filesize considerably.  If you’re frustrated with large filesizes, ensure that you’re actually compiling with ‘debug’ and ‘verbose-stacktraces’ both set to ‘false’ (or removing the parameters entirely).

(In FlashDevelop, change to ‘Release’ mode using the dropdown on the main toolbar, and turn off ‘verbose-stacktraces’ at Project -> Properties -> Compiler Options -> Verbose Stack Traces. Also, on the same screen, make sure ‘Optimize Bytecode’ is set to ‘True’.)

The Bottom Line

Bad

mxmlc -load-config+=obj\FeaturificSlimConfig.xml -debug=true -incremental=true -optimize=true -verbose-stacktraces=true  -o obj\FeaturificSlim633729054843281250

Good

mxmlc -load-config+=obj\FeaturificSlimConfig.xml -incremental=true -optimize=true -o obj\FeaturificSlim633729054843281250