Burst: Ahead-of-time compiled delegates / static functions, in builds

I noticed the Burst API has experimental functions (behind a #define) for compiling a delegate at runtime.

I'm really interested in using something like that, but as far as I can tell those of us who target mobile or console platforms where runtime code generation is disallowed won't be able to make use of Burst outside of Unity's job system.

Are there plans to extend the Burst API with a way to mark a pure static function for Burst compilation during the build process (or some other way to ahead-of-time compile functions outside of the Job system)?

In my specific case, our large codebase has a few areas which are already multithreaded using our own systems but would require months of work to switch to the Unity job system (due to extensive use of classes, inheritance, and C# containers). If we were able to leverage Burst to compile specific functions within that code, we could move the hot paths over without nearly as much work, and then slowly move the rest over time.

 

Does the Run extension for jobs not work with burst? Worth a try if you haven't already.

 

For my use-case with hot paths inside our own threads, I don't think the overhead of going through Unity's job scheduler would be ideal (if it's even possible) - while Run says it executes immediately on the same thread, it looks like it still does work inside Unity's source aside from just calling the (potentially burst-compiled) function. That said I haven't tried it, so maybe it'd work out fine.

 

You can only schedule/complete/run jobs from the main thread.

 

Indeed. I believe what it says there is a documentation issue, but I haven't tested myself to verify.

 

I saw this in another thread, it talks directly about using burst on main thread functions using Run().
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