No serious devs even uses Unity coroutines. Terrible control flow and perf. Fine for small projects on PC.

kdheiwns 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In all of my years of professional game dev, I can verify that this is not even remotely true. They're used basically everywhere. They're very common when you need something to update for a set period of time but managing the state outside a very local context would just make the code a mess.

Unity's own documentation for changing scenes uses coroutines

▲

krajzeg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Echoing the thoughts of the only current sibling comment: lots of "serious" developers (way to gatekeep here) definitely use coroutines, when they make sense. As mentioned, it's one of the best ways to have something update each frame for a short period of time, then neatly go away when it's not needed anymore. Very often, the tiny performance hit you take is completely outweighed by the maintanability/convenience.

▲

DonHopkins 3 hours ago | parent [-]

...and then crash when any object it was using gets deleted while it's still running, like when the game changes scenes, but it becomes a manual, error-prone process to track down and stop all the coroutines holding on to references, that costs much more effort than it saves.

I've been a serious Unity developer for 16 years, and I avoid coroutines like the plague, just like other architectural mistakes like stringly typed SendMessage, or UnityScript.

Unity coroutines are a huge pain in the ass, and a lazy undisciplined way to do things that are easy to do without them, using conventional portable programming techniques that make it possible to prevent edge conditions where things fall through the cracks and get forgotten, where references outlive the objects they depend on ("fire-and-forget" gatling foot-guns).

Coroutines are great -- right up until they aren’t.

They give you "nice linear code" by quietly turning control flow into a distributed state machine you no longer control. Then the object gets destroyed, the coroutine keeps running, and now you’re debugging a null ref 200 frames later in a different scene with an obfuscated call stack and no ownership.

"Just stop your coroutines" sounds good until you realize there’s no coherent ownership model. Who owns it? The MonoBehaviour? The caller? The scene? Every object it has a reference to? The thing it captured three yields ago? The cure is so much worse than the disease.

Meanwhile: No static guarantees about lifetime. No structured cancellation. Hidden allocation/GC from yield instructions. Execution split across frames with implicit state you can’t inspect.

Unity has a wonderful editor that lets you inspect and edit the state of the entire world: EXCEPT FOR COROUTINES! If you put your state into an object instead of local variables in a coroutine, you can actually see the state in the editor.

All of this to avoid writing a small explicit state machine or update loop -- Unity ALREADY has Update and FixedUpdate just for that: use those.

Coroutines aren’t "cleaner" -- they just defer the mess until it’s harder to reason about.

If you can't handle state machines, then you're even less equipped to handle coroutines.

▲

kdheiwns 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Never had a crash from that. When the GameObject is destroyed, the coroutine is gone. If you're using a coroutine to manage something outside the scope of the GameObject itself, that's a problem with your own design, not the coroutine itself.

It'd be like complaining about arrays being bad because if you pass a pointer to another object, nuke the original array, then try to access the data, it'll cause an error. That's kind of... your own fault? Got to manage your data better.

Unity's own developers use them for engine code. To claim it's just something for noobs is a bit of an interesting take, since, well, the engine developers are clearly using them and I doubt they're Unity noobs. They made the engine.

▲

Arch485 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno, I've worked on some pretty big projects that have used lots of coroutines, and it's pretty easy to avoid all of the footguns.

I'm not advocating for the ubiquitous use of coroutines (there's a time and place), but they're like anything else: if you don't know what you're doing, you'll misuse them and cause problems. If you RTFM and understand how they work, you won't have any issues.

	▲	DonHopkins 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They're a crutch for people who don't know what they're doing, so of course they invite a whole host of problems that are harder to solve than doing it right in the first place. If you strictly require people to know exactly what they're doing and always RTFM and perfectly understand how everything works, then they already know well enough to avoid coroutines and SendMessage and UnityEvents and other footguns in the first place. It's much easier and more efficient to avoid all of the footguns when you simply don't use any of the footguns.

▲

bob1029 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Who owns it? The MonoBehaviour? The caller? The thing it captured three yields ago?

The monobehavior that invoked the routine owns it and is capable of cancelling it at typical lifecycle boundaries.

This is not a hill I would die on. There's a lot of other battles to fight when shipping a game.

	▲	DonHopkins 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And then you're bending over backwards and have made so much more busy work for yourself than you would have if you'd just done it the normal way, in which all your state would be explicitly visible and auditable in the editor. The biggest reason for using Unity is its editor. Don't do things that make the editor useless, and are invisible to it. The problem with coroutines is that they generate invisible errors you end up shipping and fighting long after you shipped your game, because they're so hard to track down and reproduce and diagnose. Sure you can push out fixes and updates on Steam, but how about shipping games that don't crash mysteriously and unpredictably in the first place?

▲

voidUpdate 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just out of interest, how many serious unity devs have you talked to?

	▲	DonHopkins 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've talked to some non-serious unity devs, like Peter Molyneux... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110605 >1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on." https://youtu.be/24AY4fJ66xA?t=6486 Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Moo! https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-i-curiosity-i-exper... >"I'm jealous that [Molyneux] made a more boring clicking game than I did." -Ian Bogost >"I also think Curiosity was brilliant and inspired. But that doesn't make it any less selfish or brazen. Curiosity was not an experiment. 'Experiment' is a rhetorical ruse meant to distract you from the fact that it's promotional." -Ian Bogost