Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vermeulen | Hacker News Reader

The 'Addressables' are a abstraction layer on TOP of AssetBundles. AssetBundles aren't deprecated.

Honestly most of the criticisms you've gave are you not understanding how something works - like GetComponent. I do agree with you on 'null' though! And how Unity uses it. I think that decision came from them trying to make it more beginner friendly to deal with destroyed/removed objects when it first started - then they had to live with it

View on HN

If X is built on top of Y, and I should generally be using X, then the docs for Y should absolutely say that. Burying that away in some hard-to-find tutorial is not good practice. We could argue for a while over the exact semantic meaning of 'deprecate' and whether Y is truly deprecated if 99% of the time when you use it you should really be using X instead. But I'd hope that we can both agree on the central point of my argument here, which is that in Unity it's often incredibly difficult to figure out which of 5 vaguely-similar-looking APIs you should be using, and it's a bad sign when the best source of info is a "coming soon!" message on an out-of-date tutorial not even linked from the documentation.

Perhaps you should explain how I've misunderstood GetComponent.

The whole purpose of using 'GetComponent' in code is to get the component reference at runtime. Saying it's a problem that it doesn't statically verify it exists, doesn't make any sense

I understand that GetComponent is a runtime lookup, and what I'm arguing is that Unity made the wrong choice. Runtime lookups lead to more bugs. They lead to slower code.

The best practices that have sprouted up around GetComponent say "Use GetComponent<> only in Awake(), and don't use AddComponent or RemoveComponent at all." But once you start following all these best practices, you've lost all the benefits of having GetComponent be dynamic in the first place. So just enforce it at a code level, and give me the benefits of static typechecking and compile time errors when I screw things up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com