Unity and .NET, what’s next?
.NET Standard 2.1 support in Unity 2021 LTS enables us to start modernizing the Unity runtime in a number of ways. We are currently working on two improvements. Improving the async/await programming model. Async/await is a fundamental programming approach to writing gameplay code that must wait for an asynchronous operation to complete without blocking the engine mainloop. In 2011, before async/await was mainstream in .NET, Unity introduced asynchronous operations with iterator-based coroutines, but this approach is incompatible with async/await and can be less efficient. In the meantime, .NET Standard 2.1 has been improving the support of async/await in C# and .NET with the introduction of a more efficient handling of async/await operations via ValueTask, and by allowing your own task-like system via AsyncMethodBuilder. We can now leverage these improvements, so we’re working on enabling the usage of async/await with existing asynchronous operations in Unity (such as waiting for the next frame or waiting for a UnityWebRequest completion). As a first step, we’re improving the support for canceling pending asynchronous tasks when a MonoBehavior is being destroyed or when exiting Play mode by using cancellation tokens. We have also been working closely with our biggest community contributors, such as the author of UniTask, to ensure that they will be able to leverage these new functionalities. Reducing memory allocations and copies by leveraging Span. Because Unity is a C++ engine with a C# Scripting layer, there’s a lot of data being exchanged between the two. This can be inefficient since it often requires either copying data back and forth or allocating new managed objects. Span was introduced in C# 7.2 to improve such scenarios and is available by default in .NET Standard 2.1. In recent years, you might have heard or read about many significant performance improvements made to the .NET Runtime thanks to Span (see improvements details in .NET Core 2.1, .NET Core 3.0, .NET 6, .NET 6). We want to leverage its usage in Unity since this will help to reduce allocations and, consequently, Garbage Collection pauses while improving the overall performance of many APIs.
