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Freedom-of-Form-Foundation / anatomy3d

A CAD tool for humanoid anatomy alterations. See the anatomy3d-blender repository for more recent work.
https://freedomofform.org/1856/3d-anatomy-project-scope-phase-1-focus-on-a-limb-joint/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Switch to C# 8.0 #13

Closed AdamNorberg closed 2 years ago

AdamNorberg commented 3 years ago

Mono now supports C# 8.0, and Godot has adopted a version of Mono with that support. C# 8.0 adds some important features to the language, my favorite being nullability annotations. I like any language feature that makes the compiler catch my bugs for me.

This will involve a process of going through and converting null-oblivious code to null-annotated code, but (like all mass refactoring) this only gets harder the longer it's put off. It's also going to be annoying for everyone until we get used to null-annotated code, after which writing with null-oblivious code will feel scary and unpleasant once we are used to it.

AdamNorberg commented 3 years ago

I'm irritated to note that Mono's website says C# 7, but Godot explicitly refers to Mono's C# 8 support in its own docs - https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/scripting/c_sharp/c_sharp_basics.html - so I would infer it is supported for our use.

AdamNorberg commented 3 years ago

To be clear, this is a proposal - switching language versions is a bunch of work, although there are usually tools to automate it. We could even wait for C# 9.0 to get out of Preview and switch to that once it's generally available, since that is theoretically close-ish.

Nullability annotations will be the biggest change to get used to: every field is or isn't nullable. If it's nullable, you must declare it as type? rather than type, even if it's a class rather than a value type. If it's not, leave the declaration as-is. The compiler will forbid assigning literal null to a non-null field and will warn on assigning a might-be-null value to a non-null field. (It does not emit this warning if it recognizes that the thing you're assigning from cannot be null.)

This allows the language to express, and the compiler to enforce, that a particular API is or isn't ready to handle null references as parameters. null is very often not a value you actually want to have as a parameter, so compiler-enforced null safety is nice to have IMO.

Lathreas commented 3 years ago

I agree, moving to C#8.0 should be done. I don't think it will produce many issues at this point, and I also like compilers catching bugs for me. I've tried to make Godot target C#8.0 specifically, but so far to no avail unfortunately.

AdamNorberg commented 3 years ago

Yeah, I think the limit right now is Godot. So this might not be feasible as long as that's our frontend.

AdamNorberg commented 2 years ago

Blocking #74.

AdamNorberg commented 2 years ago

Turns out Godot is just fine with C# 8.0 and .NET Standard 2.1, and I think I have it working.