I see a lot of articles praising soft references, but I’m wondering if I should really use them.
If i run a function on an array of class references in a loop, a hard reference is all i need, but a soft reference requires an additional load and cast.
Does this really provide a performance benefit?
Soft references are not for performance, they are there to avoid loading things into memory when it’s not needed.
If you’re definitely going to be using a certain class in a BP, just use a hard ref.
The time you need soft refs are when you have a list of different classes, but you don’t know up front which one you will use when you run the blueprint.
Its uses seem to be quite limited. It was quite different from what I imagined.
Yup. It’s not for efficiency, it’s to avoid loading things you don’t need.
Use Interfaces when possible over casting & references. You can create interfaces functions that return values from the interfaced class.