Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

0.11 Section: Better Proxies #670

Merged
merged 2 commits into from
Jul 7, 2023
Merged

0.11 Section: Better Proxies #670

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
2 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
af4a443
section: Better Proxies
MrGVSV Jul 3, 2023
674741d
Merge branch 'release-0.11.0' into better-proxies
cart Jul 7, 2023
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
36 changes: 36 additions & 0 deletions content/news/2023-07-07-bevy-0.11/index.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -20,6 +20,42 @@ Since our last release a few months ago we've added a _ton_ of new features, bug
flat surfaces a feel of depth through parallaxing the material's textures.
* **Gamepad Rumble API**: an ECS-friendly way of making controllers rumble

## Better Proxies

<div class="release-feature-authors">authors: @MrGVSV</div>

Bevy's reflection API has a handful of structs which are collectively known as "dynamic" types.
These include [`DynamicStruct`], [`DynamicTuple`], and more, and they are used to dynamically construct types
of any shape or form at runtime.
These types are also used to create are commonly referred to as "proxies", which are dynamic types
that are used to represent an actual concrete type.

These proxies are what powers the [`Reflect::clone_value`] method, which generates these proxies under the hood
in order to construct a runtime clone of the data.

Unfortunately, this results in a few [subtle footguns] that could catch users by surprise,
such as the hashes of proxies differing from the hashes of the concrete type they represent,
proxies not being considered equivalent to their concrete counterparts, and more.

While this release does not necessarily fix these issues, it does establish a solid foundation for fixing them in the future.
The way it does this is by changing how a proxy is defined.

Before 0.11, a proxy was only defined by cloning the concrete type's [`Reflect::type_name`] string
and returning it as its own `Reflect::type_name`.

Now in 0.11, a proxy is defined by copying a reference to the static [`TypeInfo`] of the concrete type.
This will allow us to access more of the concrete type's type information dynamically, without requiring the `TypeRegistry`.
In a [future release], we will make use of this to store hashing and comparison strategies in the `TypeInfo` directly
in order to mitigate the proxy issues mentioned above.

[`DynamicStruct`]: https://docs.rs/bevy/0.11.0/bevy/reflect/struct.DynamicStruct.html
[`DynamicTuple`]: https://docs.rs/bevy/0.11.0/bevy/reflect/struct.DynamicTuple.html
[`Reflect::clone_value`]: https://docs.rs/bevy/0.11.0/bevy/reflect/trait.Reflect.html#tymethod.clone_value
[subtle footguns]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/6601
[`Reflect::type_name`]: https://docs.rs/bevy/0.11.0/bevy/reflect/trait.Reflect.html#tymethod.type_name
[`TypeInfo`]: https://docs.rs/bevy/0.11.0/bevy/reflect/enum.TypeInfo.html
[future release]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/8695

## `FromReflect` Ergonomics

<div class="release-feature-authors">authors: @MrGVSV</div>
Expand Down