We're targeting .NET 5 for now to make development easier while
.NET 6 is not yet released.
TEMPORARY REGRESSIONS
---------------------
Assembly unloading is not implemented yet. As such, many Godot
resources are leaked at exit. This will be re-implemented later
together with assembly hot-reloading.
The main focus here was to remove the majority of code that relied on
Mono's embedding APIs, specially the reflection APIs. The embedding
APIs we still use are the bare minimum we need for things to work.
A lot of code was moved to C#. We no longer deal with any managed
objects (`MonoObject*`, and such) in native code, and all marshaling
is done in C#.
The reason for restructuring the code and move away from embedding APIs
is that once we move to .NET Core, we will be limited by the much more
minimal .NET hosting.
PERFORMANCE REGRESSIONS
-----------------------
Some parts of the code were written with little to no concern about
performance. This includes code that calls into script methods and
accesses script fields, properties and events.
The reason for this is that all of that will be moved to source
generators, so any work prior to that would be a waste of time.
DISABLED FEATURES
-----------------
Some code was removed as it no longer makes sense (or won't make sense
in the future).
Other parts were commented out with `#if 0`s and TODO warnings because
it doesn't make much sense to work on them yet as those parts will
change heavily when we switch to .NET Core but also when we start
introducing source generators.
As such, the following features were disabled temporarily:
- Assembly-reloading (will be done with ALCs in .NET Core).
- Properties/fields exports and script method listing (will be
handled by source generators in the future).
- Exception logging in the editor and stack info for errors.
- Exporting games.
- Building of C# projects. We no longer copy the Godot API assemblies
to the project directory, so MSBuild won't be able to find them. The
idea is to turn them into NuGet packages in the future, which could
also be obtained from local NuGet sources during development.
We will be progressively moving most code to C#.
The plan is to only use Mono's embedding APIs to set things at launch.
This will make it much easier to later support CoreCLR too which
doesn't have rich embedding APIs.
Additionally the code in C# is more maintainable and makes it easier
to implement new features, e.g.: runtime codegen which we could use to
avoid using reflection for marshaling everytime a field, property or
method is accessed.
SOME NOTES ON INTEROP
We make the same assumptions as GDNative about the size of the Godot
structures we use. We take it a bit further by also assuming the layout
of fields in some cases, which is riskier but let's us squeeze out some
performance by avoiding unnecessary managed to native calls.
Code that deals with native structs is less safe than before as there's
no RAII and copy constructors in C#. It's like using the GDNative C API
directly. One has to take special care to free values they own.
Perhaps we could use roslyn analyzers to check this, but I don't know
any that uses attributes to determine what's owned or borrowed.
As to why we maily use pointers for native structs instead of ref/out:
- AFAIK (and confirmed with a benchmark) ref/out are pinned
during P/Invoke calls and that has a cost.
- Native struct fields can't be ref/out in the first place.
- A `using` local can't be passed as ref/out, only `in`. Calling a
method or property on an `in` value makes a silent copy, so we want
to avoid `in`.
REGARDING THE BUILD SYSTEM
There's no longer a `mono_glue=yes/no` SCons options. We no longer
need to build with `mono_glue=no`, generate the glue and then build
again with `mono_glue=yes`. We build only once and generate the glue
(which is in C# now).
However, SCons no longer builds the C# projects for us. Instead one
must run `build_assemblies.py`, e.g.:
```sh
%godot_src_root%/modules/mono/build_scripts/build_assemblies.py \
--godot-output-dir=%godot_src_root%/bin \
--godot-target=release_debug`
```
We could turn this into a custom build target, but I don't know how
to do that with SCons (it's possible with Meson).
OTHER NOTES
Most of the moved code doesn't follow the C# naming convention and
still has the word Mono in the names despite no longer dealing with
Mono's embedding APIs. This is just temporary while transitioning,
to make it easier to understand what was moved where.
`shader_uniform` is now consistenly used across both per-shader
and per-instance shader uniform methods. This makes methods easier
to find in the class reference when looking for them.
Implement built-in classes Vector4, Vector4i and Projection.
* Two versions of Vector4 (float and integer).
* A Projection class, which is a 4x4 matrix specialized in projection types.
These types have been requested for a long time, but given they were very corner case they were not added before.
Because in Godot 4, reimplementing parts of the rendering engine is now possible, access to these types (heavily used by the rendering code) becomes a necessity.
**Q**: Why Projection and not Matrix4?
**A**: Godot does not use Matrix2, Matrix3, Matrix4x3, etc. naming convention because, within the engine, these types always have a *purpose*. As such, Godot names them: Transform2D, Transform3D or Basis. In this case, this 4x4 matrix is _always_ used as a _Projection_, hence the naming.
Adds support for generating C# bindings that use the generic `Array<T>`
type instead of the non-generic `Array` type when the registered ClassDB
method specifies the array element type.
* Map is unnecessary and inefficient in almost every case.
* Replaced by the new HashMap.
* Renamed Map to RBMap and Set to RBSet for cases that still make sense
(order matters) but use is discouraged.
There were very few cases where replacing by HashMap was undesired because
keeping the key order was intended.
I tried to keep those (as RBMap) as much as possible, but might have missed
some. Review appreciated!
Adds a new, cleaned up, HashMap implementation.
* Uses Robin Hood Hashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#Robin_Hood_hashing).
* Keeps elements in a double linked list for simpler, ordered, iteration.
* Allows keeping iterators for later use in removal (Unlike Map<>, it does not do much
for performance vs keeping the key, but helps replace old code).
* Uses a more modern C++ iterator API, deprecates the old one.
* Supports custom allocator (in case there is a wish to use a paged one).
This class aims to unify all the associative template usage and replace it by this one:
* Map<> (whereas key order does not matter, which is 99% of cases)
* HashMap<>
* OrderedHashMap<>
* OAHashMap<>
PhysicsServer3DExtension inherits from PhysicsServer3D which is a
singleton class, since singleton classes are generated as static in C#
it would generate invalid C# so for now we'll be
ignoring PhysicsServer3DExtension.
The specific `_append_xml_*` methods implement the logic that generates
the proper XML documentation for the given BBCode tag and target and
appends it to the output.
- Outputs errors for missing members or methods when generating the C#
documentation.
- Hardcodes a special case for the `_init` method, in C# we'll reference
the constructor.
- Ignores properties with slashes (since they are not declared in C# and
can't be referenced in the documentation).
All iOS devices since the iPhone 5S support ARMv8 (64-bit).
The last iOS version supported on ARMv7 devices is 10.x, which is
too old to run Godot 4.0 projects since the minimum supported
iOS version is 11.0.
