IL2CPP support for Android/PS4/XB1

Unity Engine
1

Quick question:
Will the same team who working on IL2CPP for iOS be working on Android?
Or is it different team for all platforms?

2

Yes and yes.

The core team working on IL2CPP is still working on IL2CPP base.
The platform specific pieces though are being handled via the various platform teams.

3

What are the benefits for these platforms?
Right now not much information apart from overview

4

Short term: Better performance, startup times.
Long term: When we migrate all non-standalone platforms to IL2CPP, we can finally upgrade our .NET profile.

4 Likes
5

Android also benefits from implicit code “obfuscation” as a side-effect. :slight_smile:

6

Both a blessing and a curse, I’m afraid. It does make debugging harder.

1 Like
7

That is true, good point.

8

Will there be an option to still use the “traditional” approach longer term? I guess when you upgrade .NET, this probably means the old approach will be gone … or would it be possible to have both, if I’m not using current .NET features?

Not sure if keeping debugging easier would be worth the effort that this would probably mean but it’s probably worth a consideration.

9

We’re planning to build a debugger for IL2CPP, so by the time we drop mono support for platforms, it will be equivalent or better than Mono’s.

But yes, once .NET upgrade happens, there will be no coming back to Mono on certain platforms (or even before that).

1 Like
10

so there won’t be any Standalone IL2CPP? like for windows?

11

There will be, eventually. However, Standalone is the lowest priority target for IL2CPP for us today.

1 Like
12

so we will be stuck with the old mono runtime for way longer time…

13

No - one of the reasons why Standalone is such a low priority is because it doesn’t block us from upgrading Mono.

14

For you guys <3 but for us, we can choose to use IL2CPP or not, making debugging not so bad, right? :slight_smile:

15

what i meant was we have to wait for all the other platforms to get IL2CPP, and then we can get a mono upgrade, which may take a year or so,

16

True, but that doesn’t mean standalone gets to wait longer for .NET profile upgrade. All platforms will get it simultaneously.