This is actually an entirely new compiler written from scratch since 2010.
Frankly, complete rewrites under these circumstances are a cop out. It's an easy but ineffective path. What they should be doing is unit tests, isolating bugs and strictly controlling quality. Common bug reports should be triaged, rather than ignored (it's not uncommon to have a bug, and find a set of posts years old discussing workarounds). All it would take to fix Flex would be the will to do it.
The rewrite will have a whole different bunch of issues, and be similarly problematic. It's not like Flex was a bad apple in a bunch of well engineered Adobe software.
That's me when I remind myself of Flex development.
if(true) // i've forced this to true now
{
// this code is never reached because of that comment on the if() line
}Edit: I don't disbelieve you just, wow, that is amazingly bad.
Sincerely, compared to C++/Qt/WxWidgets, Python/Qt, Swing and even HTML/jQuery Adobe Flex was the most productive environment for frontend and desktop development for me.
It sounds that you did not have a prior experience in Flex otherwise you would know the kinks of the platform. I would say that it was not the choice of Flex that killed your startup but the uniformed choice of a technology that you never had a prior experience with.