Asmdef with subfolders?

[Spy-Master]

@VRARDAJ

I haven’t built any projects that use complex nested trees of asmdefs yet, so I haven’t really kicked the performance tires on them, but this thread confuses me. I don’t see why asmdefs would be of use for organization. I’d just continue organizing w/ namespaces within the default assembly if I thought there was not much performance value. I suppose if I wanted a white-label plugin capable of running in other .NET platforms outside of Unity, an asmdef might be useful for organization, but for any code known to only run within Unity projects, asmdefs would feel like more subfolders for my subfolders if they don’t actually separate compilation the way the documentation suggests.

For instance, say I only have two assemblies, NamespaceNameRuntime & NamespaceNameEditor, and the Editor asmdef refs the runtime asmdef but not the other way around. It sounds like we’re claiming a change in a script in Runtime namespace will force reload on both. Do I have that right? That doesn’t make sense to me. Why would asmdefs exist if they can’t separate compilation across refs?

RE: “dwarfed by domain reload,” I thought the domain was nothing more that the total collection of assemblies Unity is aware of. If so, then “domain reload” just means all changed assemblies are reloading, yes? How can an assembly reload be dwarfed by domain reload when, AFAIK, domain reload IS assembly reload? Is domain reload doing something in addition to assembly reload that I’m not aware of?

The issue is that Unity today doesn’t have any sense of tiered or incremental domain reloading. One does not simply reload only the changed assemblies. That has the potential to change in the future once they migrate to modern .NET, using tiers of AssemblyLoadContext.
https://discussions.unity.com/t/910023/2
https://discussions.unity.com/t/836646 page-51#post-9766101
asmdefs have other uses in the meantime. Source generators / analyzers can be scoped to assemblies that reference another asmdef, entire assemblies can be conditionally included in a project instead of needing per-file conditional preprocessor directives, etc.