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Comment by roflcopter69

4 days ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. Mostly very fair points.

Yes, exporting Godot + C# games to web is not possible right now and it seemingly takes the maintainers quite a lot of time to figure it out. It's apparently an official priority https://godotengine.org/priorities/#enable-users-to-export-t... but I wouldn't hold my breath for now.

Similarly for the new GDExtension based C# bindings https://github.com/raulsntos/godot-dotnet which have been cooking for quite a while now. Those would make it possible to only have a single Godot build and get rid of the .Net build. Tbf, the maintainers were teasing that godot-dotnet will soon™ be ready for early testing so who knows.

About setting up debugging+lsp, what were your struggles? Personally, I'm quite happy with JetBrains Rider Godot integration https://github.com/JetBrains/godot-support and JetBrains seems to be quite committed to supporting Godot https://godotengine.org/article/jetbrains-joins-dev-fund-sup... you even get support for Edit and Continue (EnC), which is what's easy to confuse with hot reload but EnC is actually the thing that makes it possible to change C# code while the game is running and the changes are reflected without losing the game state. Really handy. AFAIK you can't get this with open source C# tools like netcoredbg so I'd understand if you'd think that the Godot + C# DevEx is quite lacking if you use something like Neovim or Zed. I think VSCode has actually pretty good support but the really good tech behind the C# extension is proprietary and cannot be used by forks like Cursor or Windsurf.

But I totally agree, the GDScript integration is what Godot cares the most about and it shows in many places in the editor. So my experience is not wildly different in that sense. Just some different aspects I focus on maybe. But I'm always curious to see how people approach this stuff and what they feel about it.

> It's apparently an official priority

I've been following the github issue for C# web export and let me tell you: It's not been a priority.

> EnC makes it possible to change C# code while the game is running and the changes are reflected without losing the game state.

sounds exactly like code hot reload to me? It would be very nice to have.

> About setting up debugging+lsp, what were your struggles?

> Godot + C# DevEx is quite lacking if you use something like Neovim or Zed

you got me. I tried integrating a Godot workflow using neovim and at some point with emacs. Both were subpar. This actually reminds of another pain point: gdshader. Also very integrated with the editor just like GDscript, which makes it another thing you have to work on getting integrated with your IDE of choice - or you bite the bullet and just use the editor for this. But shaders are such a massive shitshow that I can't really blame Godot for this.

  • FWIW, Rider has very good support for keybindings - I can't vouch for vim bindings directly but their emacs keybinding scheme is brilliant, IMO it's the next closest thing to working from Emacs itself. So I'm guessing the vim bindings support is similarly fantastic.

    I spent ages trying to get Emacs to work well with C# stuff, because I can't stand using IDEs that don't have some sort of emacs-style keybinding support, but eventually I bit the bullet and started using Rider and honestly it's been amazing and worked seamlessly with everything I've thrown at it (especially Godot). Highly recommended.