Mono relicensed under MIT - C# for UE4 can come back?

[HavocX]

@Nico de Poel;673334

What many people don’t seem to realize is that Unity has been stuck in the same Mono licensing quagmire as Mono for UE, as described by de Icaza a few posts above. Unity’s C# integration is based on a version licensed from Novell back when they were still owners of the Mono project, around 2010-2011. When Novell got acquired and the Mono project was dropped, Xamarin took over stewardship and ever since then, Unity has been unable to renegotiate a license for Mono that suited both parties. The result is that Unity’s implementation of the C# language is now years behind on the mainline .NET implementation by Microsoft, with relatively poor performance, an outdated garbage collector and missing out on a lot of modern features. This is one of the main reasons why Unity is commonly associated with bad performance, especially on consoles. Compatibility with third-party libraries is also becoming more and more of a problem for Unity programmers, because a lot of libraries by now have dropped support for C# versions older than ~2012. Things might get better now that Xamarin and Mono are in Microsoft’s hands, and Unity has in fact made improvements to their C# compiler over the last year, but in the meantime the Mono runtime used by Unity is still the same old junk from 2010. And with each passing year, it will become harder and harder for Unity to upgrade the Mono runtime without breaking every single game ever made on the Unity engine.

Your information is old, it’s been better for over a year. The situation for Mono on UE is entirely different than the classic Unity problems. Mono has been open source for a while and there is little stopping anyone from using it. Long before this happened, Unity decided to do their own .NET implementation. It seems to be tough for them.

Xamarin is working on their own free C# plugin for UE4. It is close to being ready, but to get it working like they want they need to incorporate some parts into core UE. This has caused some legel hurdles that they expect to have solved. As Mono is open source there are some other integrations in the works, the most promising being discussed in this tread:

UnrealCS - Unity alike C# Plugin for Unreal Engine

@Nico de Poel;673334

In that regard, we should be glad that Unreal Engine is based on an open standardized language like C++ without any licensing issues to bog down development. UE effortlessly upgraded from C++11 to C++14 recently, something you might have seen in the release notes but otherwise probably never even realized had happened. IMHO Unreal dropping its custom scripting language and going full C++ and open source has been a godsend, and was a major reason for me as a programmer to jump ship to UE4.

C# is an open and standardized language, ECMA-334. There are two big open source implementations, Mono and Roslyn+.Net Core.

And Unreal’s C++ use isn’t very “open”, as it requires the proprietary Visual Studio (at least on Windows).