Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
2020 has been a tough year for most of us personally, but a good year for
Godot development nonetheless with a huge amount of work done towards Godot
4.0 and great improvements backported to the long-lived 3.2 branch.
We've had close to 400 contributors to engine code this year, authoring near
7,000 commit! (And that's only for the `master` branch and for the engine code,
there's a lot more when counting docs, demos and other first-party repos.)
Here's to a great year 2021 for all Godot users 🎆
(cherry picked from commit b5334d14f7)
This commit addresses multiple issues with `Variant`s that point to an `Object`
which is later released, when it's tried to be accessed again.
Formerly, **while running on the debugger the system would check if the instance id was
still valid** to print warnings or return special values. Some cases weren't being
warned about whatsoever.
Also, a newly allocated `Object` could happen to be allocated at the same memory
address of an old one, making cases of use hard to find and having **`Variant`s pointing
to the old one magically reassigned to the new**.
This commit makes the engine realize all these situations **under debugging**
so you can detect and fix them. Running without a debugger attached will still
behave as it always did.
Also the warning messages have been extended and made clearer.
All that said, in the name of performance there's still one possible case of undefined
behavior: in multithreaded scripts there would be a race condition between a thread freeing
an `Object` and another one trying to operate on it. The latter may not realize the
`Object` has been freed soon enough. But that's a case of bad scripting that was never
supported anyway.
Rémi Verschelde
Pedro J. Estébanez