Well I got around to playing with fcsh and man it’s so much faster. For one of my projects, each build (with incremental=true option) takes about 4-5 seconds. Under fcsh, the same project initally takes that long but each build thereafter using the compile id command took only 200ms or so even with changes to various source files.

Now to figure out how to use it with Ant. I found this post by Brian Diette and tried out his suggestion by setting the inputstring attribute for an exec task which worked. However, this approach executes a new shell process each time so it does not take advantage of the libraries loaded into memory with a single persistent one. For now, I have fcsh as an external tool in Eclipse which shows up in the console view. I then edited my Ant build script to echo the mxml command string instead of executing which I can paste it into the fcsh console and then just call compile id on subsequent builds. Yea it’s ugly but it’ll do for now.

Was going over some older Flex 2 beta posts by Ralf Bokelberg, a developer I very much admire, and found this interesting piece regarding the speed of XML vs. XMLDocument objects. Out of curiousity, I quickly tested his script with the latest Flash Player release (9.0.28.0) and sure enough, XMLDocument still beat out XML. I guess the E4X expressions remains a bit cumbersome performance-wise but it’s still very fast considering this test is being run 10,000 times. Certainly the lesser code and better readability benefits of E4X outweighs this minor performance hit but I thought it was interesting.

To get things going here, I thought I’d post a little about my build process and some tools I’ve been using. Yea it’s not a very interesting topic but whatever, it’ll be useful to have a record of whenever I need to setup my environment again.

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