You’ve probably already read sad news: on March 7 Microsoft released Visual Studio 2017.
• 2017: What’s new in C# 7
How come this is sad? Because it’s a reminder, how technologically laggard Unity is. The gap between current standards and Unity implementation is becoming huge from being just large. Here are some another missing steps in language (not mentioning library and runtime):
All these “works in beta”, or “works in Editor”, or “works with some 3rd party plugin as-is” just give nothing to production. I’ve heard it for months.
It is sad. As usual it will take a looong time until the experimental update gets added to the main branch, and even then there’ll likely be a ton of bugs that will prevent people from actually using the new features in new projects…
Lets hope they can put some more people on the dev team for that. After all, even after the platform upgrade is done there’s still the open question of package management / nuget.
At least there were some good news recently, the upgrade is being worked on and progress is steady.
This has been discussed to death several times. It’s being worked on. It’s not a simple change. Once the infrastructure is in place it will be much easier for them to keep up.
Why is it sad? Unity has to maintain implementation every facet of software technology so that it can deploy to practically every modern platform with uniformity for compiling, processing and rendering at the bare minimum while also investigating upcoming new technologies, design standards, concepts, IDE improvements and user feature requests.
If anything you should give them some credit for keeping things as stable as they are, considering the circumstances.
You could use it for tiny pet projects. But you cannot rely on it in production. You cannot write plugins that people with no this workaround installed can use.
No justification can change technological backwardness. (You can use some euphemism like “special development” or “alternative progress”, if you want.) Even if one is conclusively convinced in this justification, it is still technological backwardness. Like Cobol of gamedev.
Then go use a different engine that isn’t “technically backward”, or create your own since it’s apparently straightforward to stay on the bleeding edge.
If you can’t tolerate the outdated compiler and framework then you may want to start looking for a new engine. Realistically Unity will never be completely up-to-date with Microsoft. Microsoft simply has too many resources and far fewer platforms they need to support for Unity to go toe-to-toe with their release schedules.
Best case scenario in my opinion would have Unity be only one version behind both the compiler and framework.
Alas, I’m not in charge for such decisions which engine to use. It depends on how successful marketers are. And Unity has outstanding merketing and promotion! Far better than other engines like Xenko.
Xenko is basically a no name engine. I’m not surprised in the slightest. The engine that came to my mind was actually UE4 since it relies on a third party compiler rather than a bundled one. It’s had support for Visual Studio 2017 for a while now.
Having them waste their time responding to you won’t speed up anything.