I’ve used 2021.1.11 to make a small test application, and I was surprised to discover how often the editor interrupts me with some progress bar.
Basically, if I modify a bit of source code in VS Code, then when I alt tab back into unity, I’ll be greeted with a lengthy progress bar
“Reload script assemblies” → “compiling scripts” → “Inspector.Tick”, etc. A few seconds.
When I then click “Play” there’s another interrupting window with a progress bar, this time “Application.Reload”.
Also a few seconds but can take as many as 15 seconds or a full minute on a larger projects.
I’m on a SATA ssd, by the way, and older versions did not behave this way. I don’t recall what they did, but pressing play was almost instant, and script rebuild was immediate, and using hot reload was a plausible way to work with things, and that was on inferior hardware.
Here, at the moment the amount of interruptions, waiting time while staring at a progress bar is so high that it starts resembling development of C++ code in Unreal Engine, where you do as much as possible before hitting compile, because the compile can be long, due to the engine using C++.
I’m not sure what the heck changed, but I definitely would prefer previous behavior, where the irritating progress bar weren’t so common.