The main focus here was to remove the majority of code that relied on
Mono's embedding APIs, specially the reflection APIs. The embedding
APIs we still use are the bare minimum we need for things to work.
A lot of code was moved to C#. We no longer deal with any managed
objects (`MonoObject*`, and such) in native code, and all marshaling
is done in C#.
The reason for restructuring the code and move away from embedding APIs
is that once we move to .NET Core, we will be limited by the much more
minimal .NET hosting.
PERFORMANCE REGRESSIONS
-----------------------
Some parts of the code were written with little to no concern about
performance. This includes code that calls into script methods and
accesses script fields, properties and events.
The reason for this is that all of that will be moved to source
generators, so any work prior to that would be a waste of time.
DISABLED FEATURES
-----------------
Some code was removed as it no longer makes sense (or won't make sense
in the future).
Other parts were commented out with `#if 0`s and TODO warnings because
it doesn't make much sense to work on them yet as those parts will
change heavily when we switch to .NET Core but also when we start
introducing source generators.
As such, the following features were disabled temporarily:
- Assembly-reloading (will be done with ALCs in .NET Core).
- Properties/fields exports and script method listing (will be
handled by source generators in the future).
- Exception logging in the editor and stack info for errors.
- Exporting games.
- Building of C# projects. We no longer copy the Godot API assemblies
to the project directory, so MSBuild won't be able to find them. The
idea is to turn them into NuGet packages in the future, which could
also be obtained from local NuGet sources during development.
We will be progressively moving most code to C#.
The plan is to only use Mono's embedding APIs to set things at launch.
This will make it much easier to later support CoreCLR too which
doesn't have rich embedding APIs.
Additionally the code in C# is more maintainable and makes it easier
to implement new features, e.g.: runtime codegen which we could use to
avoid using reflection for marshaling everytime a field, property or
method is accessed.
SOME NOTES ON INTEROP
We make the same assumptions as GDNative about the size of the Godot
structures we use. We take it a bit further by also assuming the layout
of fields in some cases, which is riskier but let's us squeeze out some
performance by avoiding unnecessary managed to native calls.
Code that deals with native structs is less safe than before as there's
no RAII and copy constructors in C#. It's like using the GDNative C API
directly. One has to take special care to free values they own.
Perhaps we could use roslyn analyzers to check this, but I don't know
any that uses attributes to determine what's owned or borrowed.
As to why we maily use pointers for native structs instead of ref/out:
- AFAIK (and confirmed with a benchmark) ref/out are pinned
during P/Invoke calls and that has a cost.
- Native struct fields can't be ref/out in the first place.
- A `using` local can't be passed as ref/out, only `in`. Calling a
method or property on an `in` value makes a silent copy, so we want
to avoid `in`.
REGARDING THE BUILD SYSTEM
There's no longer a `mono_glue=yes/no` SCons options. We no longer
need to build with `mono_glue=no`, generate the glue and then build
again with `mono_glue=yes`. We build only once and generate the glue
(which is in C# now).
However, SCons no longer builds the C# projects for us. Instead one
must run `build_assemblies.py`, e.g.:
```sh
%godot_src_root%/modules/mono/build_scripts/build_assemblies.py \
--godot-output-dir=%godot_src_root%/bin \
--godot-target=release_debug`
```
We could turn this into a custom build target, but I don't know how
to do that with SCons (it's possible with Meson).
OTHER NOTES
Most of the moved code doesn't follow the C# naming convention and
still has the word Mono in the names despite no longer dealing with
Mono's embedding APIs. This is just temporary while transitioning,
to make it easier to understand what was moved where.
Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
2020 has been a tough year for most of us personally, but a good year for
Godot development nonetheless with a huge amount of work done towards Godot
4.0 and great improvements backported to the long-lived 3.2 branch.
We've had close to 400 contributors to engine code this year, authoring near
7,000 commit! (And that's only for the `master` branch and for the engine code,
there's a lot more when counting docs, demos and other first-party repos.)
Here's to a great year 2021 for all Godot users 🎆
Godot uses Variant parameters for calls to script methods.
Up until now we were boxing such parameters when marshalling
them for invokation, even if they were value types.
Now Godot allocates the marshalled parameters on the stack,
reducing the GC allocations resulted from boxing.
I couldn't find a tool that enforces it, so I went the manual route:
```
find -name "thirdparty" -prune \
-o -name "*.cpp" -o -name "*.h" -o -name "*.m" -o -name "*.mm" \
-o -name "*.glsl" > files
perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\n}\n([^#])/\n}\n\n\1/g' $(cat files)
misc/scripts/fix_style.sh -c
```
This adds a newline after all `}` on the first column, unless they
are followed by `#` (typically `#endif`). This leads to having lots
of places with two lines between function/class definitions, but
clang-format then fixes it as we enforce max one line of separation.
This doesn't fix potential occurrences of function definitions which
are indented (e.g. for a helper class defined in a .cpp), but it's
better than nothing. Also can't be made to run easily on CI/hooks so
we'll have to be careful with new code.
Part of #33027.
Using `clang-tidy`'s `modernize-use-default-member-init` check and
manual review of the changes, and some extra manual changes that
`clang-tidy` failed to do.
Also went manually through all of `core` to find occurrences that
`clang-tidy` couldn't handle, especially all initializations done
in a constructor without using initializer lists.
Don't store GC handles for C# script instances and instance bindings as 'Ref<MonoGCHandle>'; store the raw data instead. Initially this was not possible as we needed to store a Variant, but this had not been the case for a looong time yet the stored type was never updated.
Implementation for new Variant types Callable, Signal, StringName.
Added support for PackedInt64Array and PackedFloat64Array.
Add generation of signal members as events, as well as support for
user created signals as events.
NOTE: As of now, raising such events will not emit the signal. As such,
one must use `EmitSignal` instead of raising the event directly.
Removed old ThreadLocal fallback class. It's safe to use thread_local now since
it's supported on all minimum versions of compilers we support.
Added guards to all C# script interface calls to attach the current thread
for the current scope if the thread is not already attached.
This is far from ideal, as attaching the thread is not cheap and all managed
thread local storage is lost when we detach the thread at the end of the calls.
However, it's the best we can do for now to avoid crashing
when an unattached thread tries to interact with C# code.
Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
We're starting a new decade with a well-established, non-profit, free
and open source game engine, and tons of further improvements in the
pipeline from hundreds of contributors.
Godot will keep getting better, and we're looking forward to all the
games that the community will keep developing and releasing with it.
By default, an unhandled exception will cause the application to be terminated; but the project setting `mono/unhandled_exception_policy` was added to change this behaviour.
The editor is hard-coded to never terminate because of unhandled exceptions, as that would make writing editor plugins a painful task, and we cannot kill the editor because of a mistake in a thirdparty plugin.
Make the build system automatically build the C# Api assemblies to be shipped with the editor.
Make the editor, editor player and debug export templates use Api assemblies built with debug symbols.
Always run MSBuild to build the editor tools and Api assemblies when building Godot.
Several bugs fixed related to assembly hot reloading and restoring state.
Fix StringExtensions internal calls not being registered correctly, resulting in MissingMethodException.
Added constructor that takes IEnumerable for Array and IEnumerable<T> for Array<T>.
Added constructor that takes IDictionary for Dictionary and IDictionary<TKey, TValue> for Dictionary<TKey, TValue>.
- Now there is only one solution that contains both GodotSharp and GodotSharpEditor project. Previously we had one solution for each project
- GodotSharpEditor reference GodotShatp with a 'ProjectReference'. Previously it was a 'Reference' to the assembly
- This also simplifies the command line option to generate this solution: 'godot --generate-cs-api <OutputDir>'
This allows more consistency in the manner we include core headers,
where previously there would be a mix of absolute, relative and
include path-dependent includes.
When a Reference managed instance is garbage collected and its finalizer is called, it could happen that the native instance is referenced once again before the finalizer can unreference and memdelete it. The workaround is to create a new managed instance when this happens (at least for now).
- Sometimes `StackFrame.GetMethod()` returns null (e.g.: latest frame of a `MissingMethodException`). Still not sure what to do with that frame (maybe skip it), but at least it no longer fails.
- Skip `CSharpLanguage::debug_get_current_stack_info()` if an error is printed from `GDMonoUtils::update_corlib_cache()`.
- Fix crash when calling `GDMonoUtils::print_unhandled_exception(exc)` if there is no ScriptDebugger attached.
Using `misc/scripts/fix_headers.py` on all Godot files.
Some missing header guards were added, and the header inclusion order
was fixed in the Bullet module.
