[FREE Unity Plugin] Memory Efficient Coroutines

Hi,

Since no-one has said thank you, I'll just take a moment to say "Thank you!". It's this kind of work that is a key contributor to everyone producing better and more consistent Unity experiences.

Just out of interest, I use extended co-routines (by the equally amazing Twisted Oak Studios) in my builds to handle exceptions and return parameters. Would your library integrate with that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciDD6Wl-Evk
http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post83_coroutines-more-than-you-want-to-know

Peter

Nice work.

I'm using a fair number of coroutines currently, so this sounds great! I'll check it when I have the chance.

"peterept" wrote:
Hi,

Since no-one has said thank you, I'll just take a moment to say "Thank you!". It's this kind of work that is a key contributor to everyone producing better and more consistent Unity experiences.

Just out of interest, I use extended co-routines (by the equally amazing Twisted Oak Studios) in my builds to handle exceptions and return parameters. Would your library integrate with that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciDD6Wl-Evk
http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post83_coroutines-more-than-you-want-to-know

Peter

Thanks Peter :)

The key thing that makes MEC run without per-frame alloc is that it doesn't use a generic object in the return value like Unity's coroutines do. It's the type casting of this yield return <object> that causes the heap allocation. However, that does make it so you can't hook additional types into the return value.

As for exceptions, the default behavior is to output them to the console. However, the file isn't compiled to a dll or anything, so you can find the three try-catch blocks in the script and change them so they point to your custom error handler.

So, no on the returning values and yes on the custom exception handling.

When following the instructions in the PDF, changing "yield return null" to "yield return 0f" etc. and attempting to use:

private IEnumerator<float> ListenForAudioStop(AudioSource src)

I receive the errors:

error CS0308: The non-generic type `System.Collections.IEnumerator' cannot be used with the type arguments
error CS1624: The body of `...ListenForAudioStop(AudioSource)' cannot be an iterator block because `IEnumerator<float>' is not an iterator interface type

I may not have updated that PDF recently. There's more up-to-date documentation on my website, here.

In order to get rid of that error you need

using System.Collections.Generic;

Thanks! That fixed it. Unimportant, but the documentation says to use Timing.StartCoroutine(), while the method name is Timing.StartUpdateCoroutine().

By the way, the methods don't return a Coroutine object. I'm currently saving my coroutine reference and aborting it with StopCoroutine() under some circumstances. Is there any way to do something like that using MEC?

Interestingly, the profiler will only show GC Alloc for Coroutines with Deep Profile *disabled*, for some reason. Strange.

(On a separate but related subject, even in a completely empty project the profiler shows Total GC Alloc rising gradually from 7.6MB to 10.4MB and getting garbage collected every couple of seconds. The only case of GC Alloc listed in the profiler is 32B per frame for GameView.GetMainGameViewRenderRect(), but that doesn't add up so there must be something else not shown.)

Thanks! Is it always more efficient than Unity's or just in certain cases?