Baking and SerializeReference potential incompatibility

[lacostej]

Describe the bug We're seeing hard to reproduce low level crashes affecting JsonUtility deserialization of SerializeReference fields that appear to be linked to Cecil and zenject baking. Symptoms are either objects modified at runtime, or crashes in low level C# functionality.

We don't yet have the full confirmation that this is indeed the case and are working with Unity to identify the root cause. We've been pointed to this particular known Cecil incompatibility in the Unity issue tracker closed with "Arbitrary modification of a generated assembly is not supported". We have seen this with versions of Unity from 2019.4.1f1 to Unity 2019.4.9f1.

We are still using Zenject 6.6.1 but are going to experiment with newer versions of Extenject, although nothing in the Extenject git history seems to indicate that something has changed in that area.

Questions

• does the closed issue above ring a bell?
• Are you aware of any potential incompatibility issues between Cecil and Unity internals (In particular SerializeReference)?
• what are the differences between the Cecil version of Unity and the one in Zenject?

To Reproduce Hard

Expected behavior No crashes

Screenshots If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Extenject and Unity info (please complete the following information):

• Zenject version: 6.6.1
• Unity version: 2019.4.91
• Project's scripting backend Mono.
  IL2CPP being investigated

Additional context See https://github.com/DragonBox/unity_dataloss/blob/main/Statuses.md

[lacostej]

I'll add that we still have the issue even with baking off. It happens on Mono and IL2CPP backends. So most probably something internal to Unity and my guess, related to the internals of JsonUtility. So *enject baking is probably just a trigger in some situations. Oh well. Back to fiddling.