[teraflop]

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.

[whstl]

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.

[cheschire]

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.

[ACS_Solver]

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.

[whstl]

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.

[ACS_Solver]

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.

[chris_wot]

Scared off a lot of customers, too.