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Comment by makotech221 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I think Unity just doesn't have the technical skillset anymore to make the migration to coreclr. It keeps getting delayed and their tech leads keep dropping out.

Might I suggest https://github.com/stride3d/stride, which is already on .net 10 and doesn't have any cross-boundary overhead like Unity.

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Progress has been painfully slow, but Unity does seem to be moving forward.

Unity updates on their plans and progress:

2022 - officially announced plans to switch to CoreCLR - https://unity.com/blog/engine-platform/unity-and-net-whats-n...

2023 - Tech update - https://unity.com/blog/engine-platform/porting-unity-to-core...

Unite 2025 - CoreCLR based player scheduled for Unity 6.7 in 2026 - https://digitalproduction.com/2025/11/26/unitys-2026-roadmap...

Maybe they are making progress. But given that they first started talking about this in 2018, and then in 2022 they announced that they were planning to release a version with CoreCLR in 2023, and then in 2024 they said it would be in beta in 2025, and now in 2025 they're planning to release it as a technical preview in 2026, but they're still talking about an "internal proof-of-concept" as though it's something coming in the future...

As an outsider, it certainly seems like there's reason for skepticism.

Well they made some business decisions in the middle of that timeline that cut their funds quite a bit, not to mention probably scared off some good talent.

Not just probably scared off some good talent, they had xoofx leave over disagreements with higher management. xoofx was one of their most senior devs, the guy who started the CoreCLR migration and was leading it.

They'll get there eventually, but the current roadmap says experimental CoreCLR in late 2026, which then in the best case means production ready in 2027. Unity isn't going anywhere, but at least as a dev who doesn't care about mobile (which is Unity's real market), competing engines have gotten much more attractive in the last couple years and that seems set to continue.

The funny thing about his resignation is that xoofx had a CoreCLR prototype already working around 2016-ish, but the company had "other priorities" and only took it seriously until recently.

The guy should just have been left alone and shielded from company bullshit to do the migration, or empowered to fight.

I know this is one sided but: Whoever from high-management lost this guy is an absolute loser waste of space who didn't do his job and will blame xoofx for “not fighting harder” or some other bullshit. Fuck companies, and fuck loser managers.

I think 2016 is a bit too early but yeah, xoofx first wrote about CoreCLR in 2018 and said he'd made considerable progress with something like himself and two other engineers doing it as a side project. That is four years before Unity as a company announced the migration as a priority, which in turn is another four years before the current estimate for when they may ship it.

From my perspective, Unity seems very poorly managed in recent years. The editor experience isn't improving while they continue the usual pattern of shipping features in a poor state where they need another couple versions to become properly usable, and of course they make terrible decisions like the runtime fee, a total insanity that caused a huge loss of trust and boosted Godot development enormously.

Of course my perspective is biased by me not being Unity's main target market. I work on PC strategy games, which are on Steam. At our studio, we don't do mobile, advanced graphics features aren't very relevant, and we may have the most complex UI that ever shipped in a Unity game.

Scared off a lot of customers, too.

I've seen similar things from the inside in other companies. Even existential threats (like lack of Apple Silicon support for performance-critical software), getting heavily delayed because the feature treadmill won't stop and the actually important thing is a pet project of some engineer. It is basically death by a thousand papercuts, where nobody can say what the focus is.

People complain about web development but working with native apps can be depressing sometimes.

Nice link, thanks.

Stride has a fraction of the features as unity.

Godot is the only real open source competitor, their C# support is spotty. If I can't build to Web it's useless for game jams as no one should be downloading and running random binaries.

A real sandbox solution with actual GPU support is needed.

Godot 4 C# web export is coming soon : https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/106125

We'll see when it actually ships.

I've seen this issue before, they're making progress but theirs no firm release date.

Plus you then have to extensive testing to see what works in Web builds and what doesn't. I REALLY enjoy vibe coding in Godot, but it's still behind Unity in a lot of ways.

Naive question but why not use GDscript? I haven't had any issues with it

I'll vibe code stuff in GDscript, and I guess I more or less understand some of it.

But C# is what I've used for over a decade. C# has vastly better IDE support. It's a more complete language.

Plus a lot of C# assets/libraries don't really have GDScript counterparts.

I'll add that C# have better performances than gdscript. It doesn't make a difference for most of the things you code in a game, but it comes in handy when needed.

I'd caveat this slightly as "it depends"

For mathy stuff, 100% c# is going to be better. But if you need to round trip to the engine a lot getting stuff in and out of the dotnet heap can actually hurt performance. You also have to be _really_ careful because there are a lot of cases you generate accidental garbage (biggest one is when you use strings that are getting implicitly converted to StringNames every time you run a function, you can avoid this by pre-generating them as consts but I've run into a fair few people who never ran dotmemory or the like to see the issues).

Yes, it tooks me 2 years to see how much garbage strings conversion to String Names generates and how a fool I was calling something like Input.IsActionPressed("move_right") every frame (sadly it's the example given in the input documentation).

Yup. I remember running dotmemory on a whim and being confused by all the stringnames until I noticed what was in them. They really should put that in the docs to just make a const stringname somewhere. I use a global static class for anything I want in multiple files. But I also tend to just use statics instead of autoloads if I'm doing everything in c#.

Writing C# in godot is a bad choice. Use GDScript and directly write c++ as a module. Skip "HD extension" completely. Godots build system is easy enough to use. Just add new classes to the engine using c++ if you don't want to use GDScript. The GDScript workflow is honestly great. Using C# is like the worst of all worlds.

I don't like C++.

It's very difficult to me, I generally stick to high level stuff , C#, JavaScript, Python, Dart, etc.

If you can code in C#, how is C++ difficult? Are pointers and the stl that difficult?

Not denigrating, genuine question.

One word.

Headers.

That's just the start. The C++ build system and package managers are the stuff if nightmares. Modern languages are significantly easier to use.

Don't get me wrong, if you offer a job with a 200k base salary and give me 6 months to learn C++ I'll do it. But I won't enjoy it, and I definitely won't do it as a hobby.

If you use an existing template (and are willing to use scons) GDExtension doesn't really have the standard build problems of rigging everything up with CMake/etc in my experience. The template is set up to handle the "set up the build" problem for you. Still have the header problem though cannot deny that one.

Java was designed to make fun of C++, then C# was designed to make fun of Java, so you're missing two layers of fun.

I can tolerate Java. I've worked a Java dev role recently.

I think it's overly verbose and probably has a lot of unneeded legacy stuff, but in terms of making money so I can afford donuts, it's not bad.

My personal favorite language is probably Dart, but it's basically useless outside of Flutter and I don't have faith in Google to keep Flutter going.

I don't like low level programming. My dream language is literally an LLM that processes a markdown document where I sorta just describe what I want to happen. With options to call defined functions in a normal programing language

If I had money ( VC money) I'd be working on this.

I write mostly backend stuff for a living, big chunk of it in Node/TS but also C# with modern .NET. I also have to dabble with Unity and Unreal both for work and a hobby project. I technically learned C++ in uni but really, I hate every single second I have to spend doing Unreal Engine work. I genuinely despise how obsolete and hard to write C++ is compared to modern languages. It didn't bother me in university because that was all I knew at the time but it's hard to justify existence of header files today. Add macros everywhere, really bad compilation errors, really hard to read syntax with a lot of unnecessary bloat and you get something that is just not likable. I'm sure you can get used to it given enough time spent in that ecosystem, but I can tell you as someone writing 4 different languages on day to day basis, C++ is difficult, and it's not because of pointers.

Yeah that's why GDScript is great.

You only dabble in the c++ for the sliver of the project that needs it. 90% of game development is animating stuff and user interface development. GDScript is great for that.

You're asking if going from a high level language to a low level language on steroids is difficult?

Pointers, manual memory management, and the design by committee standard library are not fun.

Problem is, GDScript still doesn't have at least a JIT, and the whole GDextensions boilerplate seems more complicated than it needs to be.

"not having a JIT" is not a problem, it's you speculating that a JIT will improve performance, the real problem is "GDScript has poor performance", which in this context (me saying C# in godot sucks) is you speculating that C#'s performance is better than GDScripts. Do you have any data to back that claim up? Like real world data from a real product? Or are you just speculating with vibes?

If performance is a concern, skip C# and go straight to c++. Now your ripping at max speed with the smallest binary! That's my whole point. GDScript + c++ is my point. Ditch C# it's not worth the squeeze.

Some people like nice tooling with performance.

Interpreter code is never faster than a dynamic compiler, otherwise what about doing games in Python?

As mentioned on my comment, GDextension experience kind of sucks.

Lots of excellent games are written in Python, Lua, JavaScript and GDScript. These abstract criticisms are just that, abstract.

I'm offering real practical advice from experience of having worked on real projects.

I'll make it real clear:

GDScript & c++ > C#

GDScript is not very maintainable as the code base grows. It lacks proper refactoring tools (e.g. the ones from Jetbrains Rider), static type checking, flexible object system and many 3rd party libraries which might be needed

My main point is: if GDScript isn't good enough, go straight to c++ directly in the Engine.

I won't even get into how big of projects I've written in GDScript successfully.

I don't want to do manual memory management and pointer handling

I don't want to have any sort of undefined behavior

I want to have quick code reload button in the editor

I want to still rely of the engine official documentation with examples like it is with GDScript and C#

You likely won't need to do manual memory management nor think about undefined behavior. If your writing basic c++ to handle the simulation in a game, it's going to be pretty orthodox and these problems likely won't manifest.

The purpose of recommending c++ here is:

If GDScript is too slow, reach directly for C++.

I'm specifically recommending GDScript over C# for ease of use and c++ over C# for performance.

Are there technical reasons to prefer GDScript over C#?

GDScript is undoubtedly better integrated in the engine, but I would have expected C# compare more favorably in larger projects than the game jam sized projects I have made.

Performance is one issue with C#: https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity...

I don't see how this article could possibly support the argument that C# is slower than GDScript

It compares several C# implementations of raycasts, never directly compares with GDScript, blames the C# performance on GDScript compatibility and has an strike-out'ed section advocating dropping of GDScript to improve C# performance!

Meanwhile, Godot's official documentation[1] actually does explicitly compare C# and GDScript, unlike the the article which just blames GDScript for C#'s numbers, claiming that C# wins in raw compute while having higher overhead calling into the engine

[1]: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#doc-fa...

My post could have been a bit longer. It seems to have been misunderstood.

I use GDScript because it’s currently the best supported language in Godot. Most of the ecosystem is GDScript. C# feels a bit bolted-on. (See: binding overhead) If the situation were reversed, I’d be using C#. That’s one technical reason to prefer GDScript. But you’re free to choose C# for any number of reasons, I’m just trying to answer the question.

At least in my case, I got curious about the strength of /u/dustbunny's denouncement of Godot+C#.

I would have have put it as a matter of preference/right tool with GDScripts tighter engine integration contrasted with C#'s stronger tooling and available ecosystem.

But with how it was phrased, it didn't sound like expressing a preference for GDScript+C++ over C# or C#++, it sounded like C# had some fatal flaw. And that of course makes me curious. Was it a slightly awkward phrasing, or does C# Godot have some serious footgun I'm unaware of?

Makes sense! I think dustbunny said it best: C# is “not worth the squeeze” specifically in Godot, and specifically if you’re going for performance. But maybe that’ll change soon, who knows. The engine is still improving at a good clip.

I think WebAssembly could become that sandboxed solution. .NET Blazor WASM is moving away from mono to CoreCLR (just like Unity, with an early preview in late 2026). WASM now has really good SIMD support, native GC, large memory support, and with WebGPU we could finally see some native WASM games running at native speeds.

Wait, what, WASM has native GC now?

It's still not JS-level/JS-compatible GC (yet?) and it is still quite low level (more about corralling buffers of bytes than objects, a bit closer to OS-level page management than JS or C# level GC), as it is intended to be lower level than most languages need so that different languages can build different things with it. It is also a tiny stepping stone to better memory sharing with JS APIs (and the eventual goal of WASM "direct DOM"), but still not quite finished on that front as more steps remain.

> Yeah I think Unity just doesn't have the technical skillset anymore

It's not a technical skillset issue, it's a case of lacking resources, leadership changing priorities and changing requirements mid-development, causing a lot of work to be redone.

We still have highly skilled developers working in this area, if we can just actually be allowed to do (and keep) we work we have.

Imagine you have to communicate that rewrite and drop of support for bought "addons" to the people who went on that shopping spree. Who then would have to explain the "wecan"-value drop + cost of recovery of the same abilities to the shareholders and customers. The magpiesnest of bought companies tech is a tarbaby for any tech lead, the rewrite a career ender for the CEOs office.

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