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by timmytokyo 1005 days ago
>Unity has spent the last five years working on speeding up their scripting with crazy projects such as building two custom compilers, SIMD maths libraries, custom collections and allocators, and of course the giant (and very much unfinished) ECS project. It’s been their CTO’s primary focus since 2018.

That would be Joachim Ante, who is no longer CTO. He's "on sabbatical" and hasn't contributed any posts to the forums for over a year. (He used to be quite active on Unity's forums.) The entire leadership of the ECS/DOTS team has resigned.
2 comments
johnnyanmac 1004 days ago
He wasn't just active on forums, he was actively developing on Unity itself, in the weeds with all the other engineers. He arguably got a bit too involved at times, but it was very admirable for a "executive" who could retire on the interest of his shares in Unity to still take so much care in the product. I can't say that about many 10+ year old company founders, let alone ones that went public.

And of course the moment he silently stepped out, Unity rolls all this BS out in less than 6 months. Joe wasn't just champion of the tech, he was likely one of the last of the old guard up top keeping things focused on the actual product instead of how to extract infinite monies.

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pests 1005 days ago
> the entire leadership of the ECS/DOTS team has resigned

Recently because of the drama or unrelated? That’s sad to hear as I was very excited on that effort.

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timmytokyo 1005 days ago
I don't think it was due to the recent drama. (Although who knows, maybe they knew what was coming.) Mike Acton and Andreas Fredriksson left back in March 2023 I think. They posted to twitter.

EDIT: It was in May.

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johnnyanmac 1004 days ago
Not recently, but there was a steady drain of talent. The two heads of the DOTS initiative were gone by May of this year and the CTO, and the last original Founder of Unity, and arguably largest champion of DOTS, silently stepped down in April when introducing the new CTO. Johacim's official status is apparently "sabbatical" (I'm sure he owns way too much stock and other sway to be hoisted out the traditional way).
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