Unity Future .NET Development Status

Hello everyone,

With the summer holidays upon us, It’s been a while since my last update, so I wanted to share some progress on our .NET Modernization effort.

The transition to .NET 8/CoreCLR is moving along smoothly. We’re continuing to execute the plan I outlined in my previous post, and we’ve made good progress in several key areas:

  • The Unity Editor and Players are now fully running on .NET 8 CoreCLR, with Mono officially removed.

  • We’ve successfully converted over 80 assemblies to be loaded into a long-living Assembly Load Context (ALC) and have begun testing this in the Editor. However, converting all remaining assemblies requires collaboration with other Unity teams, and we’re planning to complete this work in the coming months.

  • IL2CPP support for .NET 8 BCL is progressing well, with a significant portion of our integration tests now starting to run on key platforms.

  • We’ve also made considerable progress on MSBuild support for building user projects, which involved migrating several projects and packages. This feature is currently opt-in, as we’re still working towards making it the default.

  • The integration of Burst into the core of the Unity Editor/Engine is advancing steadily.

As with any complex project, some aspects are time-consuming and may not be particularly exciting from an external perspective. For example, while we’ve converted over 30 additional modules, the work is meticulous and requires time. Additionally, software development can sometimes be affected by factors beyond our control (such as team changes), which can impact our pace.

At this stage, we still can’t provide a specific ETA. However, with Unite coming up soon, we hope to offer a glimpse into what’s ahead.

I hope this message finds you well.

Best regards

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