The Future of Scripting in Unity

“The Future of Scripting in Unity” promises a lot of wonderful things, we were so long waiting for. “.NET Upgrade”, they said. “Feature development and bug fixing proceed much faster”, “will keep on leveraging the wonderful Mono Project”, they said.

Today is precisely two years since this article was posted: May 20, 2014.

 

The biggest issue I have with il2cpp is that the editor is using Mono. So now, when I deploy to iOS and use il2cpp, I get bugs I never encountered in the editor.

 

Uhh yeah...that year of introducing 64bit support through il2cpp was a lost year... =O

 

The biggest issue I have with il2cpp is that it prevents “.net profile upgrade”. So we cannot use up-to-date class libraries, compiler, runtime, and language syntax.

 

You can actually update the compiler to use C# 6 features, but the CLR is still 2.0 so you will not get async/await type features. This also apparently fixes the foreach memory leak. https://bitbucket.org/alexzzzz/unity-c-5.0-and-6.0-integration/src

I want to reiterate that I think it's silly that we don't have an updated runtime. I hope it actually happens now that the license restriction on Mono has been removed.

 

Not gonna happen: “So the whole topic is irrelevant to Unity: Xamarin is free now but this won't affect Unity in any way because they're making their own CLR replacement.”
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/update-for-language-runtime-libraries-any-eta.398740/
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/xamarin-now-free-and-supposedly-open-source.395040/page-4

 

I believe you, Josh!

 

Any news?

 

I just noticed this. A little slip that indicates the REAL timeline?

 

Wait, so there's a chance we won't have to work around bugs that were fixed in 2009 this year?

Woo hoo, I guess?

 

Well, now in updated roadmap for 5.5: “Upgrade Mono C# compiler against our current .Net 2.0 and 2.0 Subset profiles. Note that this is an upgrade of the C# compiler only, not the full Mono runtime”

What about async/await and it's library support (`Task` and other classes from TPL)?

 

Any ETA for 5.5? At least new compiler is still better than nothing, even if no upgrade for language/libraries/runtime. Looks like these new features will not be available this year

 

“Give us your feedback!”, says amazing video clip in recent exciting blog post.

Unfortunately, my English vocabulary is very poor, not enough to express my emotions, when you are waiting for upgrade to modern C#/.NET for years, and official blog after all EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE NEW UBER FEATURE MEGA COOL SPLASH SCREEN!

 

Totally agree. Unity shouldn't be fixing bugs or developing new features until they are completely done with [some particular feature I want]. I have been waiting for [amount of hours/months/years] for [some particular feature I want]! I refuse to believe that some features requires more development time than others or that the priorities of other developers are different from mine!

Also, considering that Unity only employs one programmer and can therefore only work on one thing at a time, I can't believe they are wasting time not working on [some particular feature I want]!

 

I didn't mention other developers, just described my frustration: the difference between expected kind of news and actual blog post. They explicitly asked for my feedback in video, so here it is. Just to prevent UniDevs being deluded that all developers share their enormous enthusiasm about delivering such “features”.

 

There is a proverb in russian: “обещанного три года ждут”. That means literally: you have to wait for three years for what was promised. Let's check: https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

2014-05-20 Announce in blog: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-in-unity/
2016-11-30 Upgrade Mono C# compiler against our current .Net 2.0 and 2.0 Subset profiles. Note that this is an upgrade of the C# compiler only, not the full Mono runtime [and not the language]
2017-03-?? Nothing in Unity 5.6 in roadmap
2017-??-?? Upgrade Mono Runtime against our current .Net 2.0 and 2.0 Subset profiles. This includes many fixes and improvements, but does not include an upgrade to the .Net 4.6 profile.
????-??-?? Upgrade .Net profile to 4.6 enabling access to the latest .Net functionality and APIs.

 

It would be great to try it on actual devices (Android, iOS), not only in Editor. I'm worrying that — despite you're saying it's almost ready to market — it is still not even in roadmap: «2017-??-?? does not include an upgrade to the .Net 4.6 profile.»

Our company cannot afford using previews and betas for production

 

@JoshPeterson

In the current runtime upgrade preview builds there is a notice:

so I haven't even bothered checking the performance. Will the next build be different?

 

What about .NET Standard? Will your Mono version implement `.netstandard1.6`?
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/net-standard.451314/

Offtopic: Not sure if you are already aware of authentication/session issues in forums. But it is EXTREMELY hard to post message in thread. Site constantly redirects to “You must be signed in to do that” message.

 

Three years, guys...

 

No problem, I'm rescheduling bumping this thread at May, 20, 2018 then.

(Well, I'd rather schedule repeating notification for every year until my retirement...)