Over a year ago I wrote an article title Do Foreach Loops Create Garbage using Unity 5.2 and tested foreach with a variety of collections: List, Dictionary, arrays, etc. Since then Unity has a new C# compiler and version 5.6 has been released. Is it safe to use foreach now? Read on to find out!
Posts Tagged GC
Closures allow you to save the local variables of a function and access them later in a callback. Think of how lambdas can access the local variables of the function they’re declared in, even though the lambda itself is another function. Unfortunately, creating a lambda like this creates garbage for the GC to collect and you have no control over that process. Today’s article introduces an alternative that allows you to take control over the GC and still use nice, type-safe closures. Read on to learn how!
One of the advantages we get when we use unmanaged memory is a huge increase in flexibility. For example, we can easily allocate a whole array of objects at once instead of one-at-a-time when we new a class instance. We can also create a memory pool with one allocation then divide it up ourselves. It turns out that can really speed up memory allocation and, at the same time, actually reduce memory fragmentation on top of the fragmentation we’re avoiding by not creating any garbage for the GC. Today’s article shows you how memory pools work and provides an implementation of one you can use in your own projects!
Two facts are at odds in Unity programming. First, delegates like Action, Func, and EventHandler are extremely common with or without events. Second, the garbage collector is a huge source of CPU spikes and memory fragmentation in our games. Why are these facts at odds? Because code that uses delegates is almost always written in a way that creates garbage. It’s an extremely easy trap to fall into, but this article will show you how to get out of it!
C# has built-in events and they work fine in Unity projects. End of story, right? Not so fast! Have you ever wondered why the Unity API doesn’t have any C# events in it? Or why Unity made their own UnityEvent class for UGUI? Maybe there are some valid reasons to avoid C#’s events. Today’s article discusses an alternative with some serious upsides. Read on to learn more!
Unity’s garbage collector is super slow and the bane of our programming life. It’s the reason we can’t use foreach, have to make pools of objects, and go to great lengths to avoid boxing. It’s also seemingly mandatory, but that’s not quite true. Today’s article shows you a way that you can skip the GC and still allocate memory!
Runtime asserts, not the asserts in unit tests, are a valuable debugging tool for any game developer. Today’s article shows you what they are, how to use them, how not to use them, and how they work. Read on to learn more!
Which JSON library creates the most garbage? That’s a common question I get in response to my JSON articles. Today’s article finds out the answer!
Today we’ll wrap up the iterator series by finishing up porting C++’s <algorithm> header. We end up with a library of functions for common LINQ-style algorithms but without any of the garbage creation that slows our games down. Read on for the source and examples!
We’re nearing the end of the series to build a no-garbage replacement for System.Linq. Today we tackle functions that work on already-sorted ranges and functions that work on ranges that are in heap order. These include common set operations like “union” and “intersection”. Read on to see how to use them and for the updated library that you can use to eliminate your garbage creation!