My comment explains the entire purpose for using it - if I didn't, it would've got rewritten into `a.b` and none of the public API's would work!

I wish there were a better way to indicate which properties were renameable, because I need this too and I'm not willing to go as far as you did.

You can tell it which properties to keep with `goog.exportSymbol()`

there is a much better way to deal with this:

https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/api-tuto...

Thanks - I remember seeing that when looking through the docs, but I don't really like that either, unfortunately. I'm using Uglify right now, and I was thinking of adding a pre-minify step that walks the AST for a JSDoc-style annotation on either the properties themselves or a containing object, and pulls out the list of property names to preserve that way.