Now that’s quite interesting!
Yeah, I found that super interesting too. I’m shocked that Microsoft are doing anything other than lock people into their own platforms. It makes me feel old to say it, but “it’s a sign of the times”.
Might be good news for the C# platform outside of Unity. but as long as I don’t hear anything from Unity that they plan to license Mono from Xamarin to actually keep up with that development, I’m far from exited. This should be priority number one since Unity lives or dies with its Mono code. If that is frozen and no longer upgraded, sooner or later the developers will leave since nobody wants to work against a tech that is no longer evolving.
MEF, EF, e.g. would be useful. async/await (which is coming on all platforms and will be even implemented by MS in c++ and sent in for possible standardization in the ISO) could finally replace the awful API for coroutines we currently have. (Seriously most frameworks out there that had coroutines have upgraded to async/await APIs at least half a year ago, Unity feels incredibly outdated by now in terms of its API.
Time something changed here. Yes it is probably a big money question to get the necessary commercial license and it’s probably a matter of making that possible while still keeping Unity cheap. But I hope the team realizes that Unity is completely depending on their C# developer base, and those developers are no going to stick around for long if Unity goes out of date at this rate. New GUI and other upcoming stuff is very welcome but the absolute main effort should be to get Mono licenced within the 4.x cycle so Unity is guaranteed to remain up to date with .NET and Mono.
I mean seriously… aside from LINQ Unity is still in .NET 2.0 land. That is really ancient history and frankly embarassing.
I am personally working with Unity for the first time now, and my absolute number 1 concern is… am I investing in the right technology considering this technology is already nearly 10 years out of date and there’s no mention of that changing anytime soon. To me that’s a sign that someone on the team has missed a memo at some point. Unity became such a movement by utilizing the C# language and the huge developer base behind the .NET/Mono community. I hope the team realizes how much is riding on this and how dangerous it is to fail to keep such a core element up to date.
I completely agree. I just wish we had something (even: “Yes, we are considering options”). Or perhaps if we had the option to purchase a license from Xamarin individually - and the ability to select a version (I’d happily pay extra to be able to use .NET 4.0 features).
I’m guessing they’ve made changes to Unity’s version of Mono though - which could be problematic. I don’t know… We just have to wait and see
I think MS plans on leveraging Unity to create multiplatform presentation software based on MS .Net and business databases / HR SW and what not. I bet eventually you’ll be able to publish to Windows Store / Windows Phone from os X. I’m being MS want do send Larry Ellison, Oracle dB Java into retirement too. LOL. Java was the ‘old business scientific cross platform language and library’. No doubt MS needs this to make Windows platforms very technically superior to iOS / Android. Shows that browsers desktops are really in decline. And that’s the way it should be really…you don’t need a desktop unless you’re a programmer, artist, or some time of technical software is needed to do your work from home job.
Java is not going anyway anytime soon, not for a long long time.
Pretty much all post-secondary computing programs around the world use Java as their primary language of instruction (with primary focus in first and second year).