Question Ignore ConditionalAttribute methods on build

Hello. I have a question about the build pipeline. I'm not sure whether it is a bug or not. But the following code won't build.

Code (CSharp):

1. [Conditional("UNITY_EDITOR")]
2. private static void Test()
3. {
4.     Debug.Log($"Is any shader compiling: {UnityEditor.ShaderUtil.anythingCompiling}");
5. }

I still have to use IF statements to set conditions, even though the method has a conditional attribute.

Code (CSharp):

1. [Conditional("UNITY_EDITOR")]
2. private static void Test()
3. {
4. #if UNITY_EDITOR
5.     Debug.Log($"Is any shader compiling: {UnityEditor.ShaderUtil.anythingCompiling}");
6. #endif
7. }

Why does Unity add support for conditional attributes but it doesn't work as expected?

 

I don't think the problem is in the conditional decorator. I don't think a decorator could ever prevent underlying code from being compiled.

When building a game, 100% of what is in the

UnityEditor

namespace simply doesn't exist, so you would need to guard against using anything like that.

 

Yeah, all that ConditionalAttribute does is tell the compiler to not actually generate the instructions that call the function.

Hence why it only works on functions with a void return type -- trying to do that with a non-void function would leave you with a missing value!

 

So, yeah. The compiler doesn't strip any conditional methods to prevent possible issues with reflection. This makes sense now.