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Developer makes the same game twice in Unity and Godot after struggling to choose an engine, delivering detailed comparison of the pros and cons (automaton-media.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/gamedev@programming.dev
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[–] 50 points 3 months ago (7 children)

In Grové’s tests, Unity took 15.4 seconds to compile scripts, while Godot Engine took just 0.31 seconds, which is a significant gap. This is likely due to Unity’s standard use of the compiled language C#, whereas Godot uses its interpreted in-house language GDScript, allowing for much faster iteration times.

Both C# and GDScript are (typically) compiled to bytecode, so they are probably more similar than they are different when it comes to the compilation step. (C# does get compiled to native machine code by the .NET runtime, the GDScript bytecode is likely still running in an optimized interpreter.) There is no excuse why Unity should be taking that long to compile its scripts. Certainly that's not a failure of the language used.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    I'm guessing it's due to Unity firing up a full modern toolchain during compilation versus GDScript's simpler bespoke compiler.

    It would have been a better comparison if he'd used C# for both games, given Godot supports it as an alternate to GDScript.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I mean you can go both ways. If godot fell behind then it would be argued that it's not it's primary language. IE I'm not a huge expert on how the languages work. but I'd imagine godot would be less efficiant when using the languages that it supports, but wasn't built for.

    That's like competing in a reading contest with your second language, versus an opponent who only speaks the language.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago*

    C# has faster execution speed compared to GDScript, but Godot needs to marshal data when communicating between the core engine and the C# runtime, which can negatively affect performance if you don't keep it in mind when writing your code.

    But ultimately I'd argue compilation speed is waaay more important than execution speed when it comes to creating games (which require rapid iteration and testing). There's only a small amount of code in a codebase where squeezing out the maximum performance is required, and those important bottlenecks can be refactored or rewritten in a more performant language if needed.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Unity firing up a full modern toolchain

    It's funny you say that because Unity's C# tooling is soooo many years behind. They're still using Mono. (Godot also used it in the past.) And apparently only some time this year (end of 2026?) will they have proper modern C# with all its performance benefits.

    edit: Actually I just found this in a related article (unsure about whether it's slop or not, so not gonna link it) but apparently the horrible compile times is from something called "Domain Reload" and is caused exactly by that ancient tooling being used.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    godot mono version also compiles C# faster IME

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