Today we’ll make a new type that addresses some of the deficiencies in Nullable<T>. We’ll end up with a good tool for dealing with operations that may or may not produce a result or take a parameter, even in Burst-compiled code. Read on to see how it works!
Posts Tagged generic
About a year ago we saw how easy it is to use code generation to go beyond the limits of C# generics. The system we used simply replaced strings in a template file to generate a C# file. Today we’ll go way further and radically increase the power of the code generator by using some simple, off-the-shelf tools.
A lot of powerful language features like LINQ require massive performance hits, but today we’ll discuss some easy, low-overhead ways to add some safety and usability to C#.
C# allows for overloading not just function names, but also type names. This is used throughout the .NET and Unity APIs for interfaces like IEnumerable and IEnumerable<T>, classes like UnityEvent<T0> and UnityEvent<T0, T1>, and delegates like Action<T1, T2> and Action<T1, T2, T3>. C++, however, does not support type overloading. Today’s article explores how to deal with this and, once we’ve solved the issue, what extra C# features we’ll have access to in C++.
Since their introduction in part 7, support for C++ MonoBehaviour messages has always been a special case. The reason for this was that we didn’t have good enough support for what I’m calling “factory functions.” These are functions like GameObject.AddComponent<T> that instantiate a generic type. This week we’ll go over why that support was lacking, what was done to fix it, and how the new system works.
The story usually has three parts. First, find the highest CPU cost functions in a profiler. Second, look at the corresponding C++ code that IL2CPP generated from C#. Third, stop using more parts of C#. Today’s article explores some more IL2CPP output and discovers some more areas of C# that are shockingly expensive to use.
C# APIs are chock-full of generics. Generic types, generic method parameters, generic return types, generic fields, generic properties, deriving from generic types, and generic constructors. We can find all of these in the Unity and .NET APIs. Some are more frequent than others, but we’re going to need support for all of them to make C++ scripting a viable alternative to C#. Today’s article continues the series by adding just that: support for all of these kinds of generics. Let’s dive into how to use them as well as some bonus items added to the project this week.
The series continues this week by addressing a pretty important issue. Previously, we were limited to doing all our work in just two C++ functions: PluginMain and PluginUpdate. This isn’t at all the normal way to work in Unity. It’d be a lot more natural to write our code in MonoBehaviour classes. So today we’ll come up with some tricks to allow us to write our MonoBehaviour code in C++ so we are truly scripting in C++.
Most of C#’s support for generics was covered in the previous article, but today we’ll wrap it up by discussing covariance and contravariance. We’ll also talk about C#’s support for annotations and compare to what’s available in AS3.
Continuing once again, today we cover an exciting new topic: generics! Have you ever wished your classes could be parameterized with a type like Vector.<Type> is? With C# generics, you can! Even better, you can parameterize your interfaces, methods, and delegates too. Read on to learn how.