Question: I moved from using the Flex Builder 3 IDE to Flash Builder a couple weeks ago and have noticed a ridiculous jump in compile times with the same project. It almost seems like every time I build it does a clean build. The project I am working with is pretty big, but when it takes more than 4 mins to build, something is wrong. I tried adding more memory to eclipse and all the tricks I could find on the web but the compile time never really changed.

I am running under Windows 7 32bit, and I get the same performance from the plugin and stand alone version of the IDE.

Anyone know why and how I can speed things up?

Answer: 
First of all, it's worth noting that in checkers, half the squares on the boards can never be used, so you really only need an array of 32 items, not 64. Taking kings into account, you get possibilities from 0 to 4 instead of 0 to 2 (though when I did it, I found it easier to use -3 to +3 instead, so the values for red and black have the same magnitude and opposite signs).
In terms of lists, I would highly recommend against using a structure that uses linked lists in this situation. You'll likely already know the positions that you want to investigate (x-y coordinates), and so a linked list would require `O(n)` time to simply grab the value of the checkerboard space. As other answers have mentioned, a bitmap or long approach would be ideal.

In terms of how to organize the data, I would imagine that an implementation where both the black and white are stored in the same structure would be ideal. You'll have some overhead since storing `2` and `3` in binary require the same amount of memory, though if you're writing checkers, you'll likely need to stored "kinged" data anyway. Having the ability to check if a space is open by performing a single lookup should provide a significant performance benefit.

Hope this helps.