Just a dumb question. When DOTS finally comes out, full and ready, will it replace monobehavior and gameobjects or will it coexist?
I heard many things about it being remake of the engine itself which suggests the replace, but then there are things like gameobjects-to-entities which suggests the latter so I am confused.
It’s very unlikely that a pure data oriented approach would be the only way to create games and applications in Unity. There are many games or game types which are fundamentally object oriented and it wouldn’t make much sense to use DOTS. For example something like a chess game. The DOTS approach would be just more complicated and doesn’t provide any advantage. I see this similar to the difference between SQL databases and NoSQL databases.Since there are many different NoSQL databases which are great in some situations, usual relational databases have not vanished and most likely will never ^^.
As Andrew said above, there is no point in speculation how the situation is in the far future. The world and technology changes way faster than we can catch up. In the far future our hardware may look completely different. We already have GPUs which support / are optimised for raytracing, so no one can predict where tech will go in the far future. Apart from that Unity is very keen in keeping backwards compatibility. Since the majority of projects use gameobjects and MonoBehaviours it’s very unlikely that they will drop support for this.