Net Standard 2.0/2.1 vs .NET 4.x - what is newer/better?

At a superficial level (my limited understanding) Net Standard 2.0/2.1 should be something older than .NET 4.x, but it seems these are two different things, and I have no idea what's newer/better, or why/what.

Can someone speak to me as though I'm a complete imbecile and know nothing about the .NET, Net Standard etc world.. cause that's where I'm at.

Sorry to clog forums with this. My searches on google only led to more confusions.

 

Sorry, read it and many other pages.

Still can't grok what's the difference between Standard (which seems to be in the 2's) and Framework (which seems to be in the 4's)?

And why do I choose between these two in Unity?

 

Everything you need to know about these in context of Unity is here. Everything else is good to know but is not crucial.

 

I am so very glad I asked. And incredibly grateful you've taken the time to clear this up.

THANK YOU!!!

A good long while back, I read somewhere about .NET 4.x in Unity giving better performance, and went "up" to that.

There was a bit of a speed boost in Play Mode, but there's always been these foibles in builds that I couldn't track down, because I never thought it would be .NET 4.x as I'd wrongly presumed this was the better, newer, all singing, all dancing, ONE, and that I'd have to fix all those foibles in builds later on.

It never once occurred to me that I should roll back to Net Standard 2.0

Then, just today, I noticed that the great Keijiro has been using Net Standard 2.0 and 2.1 for his more recent experiments. Knowing he's cutting edge, I found this odd. So thought I'd best find out what is what in this crazy world of .dots and Nets and NETS and Frameworks and Standards and 2's and 4's.

I hope there's not too many others like me that have naively pushed up to .NET Framework 4.0 etc.

Cheers!

 

That seems to be talking about folks making libraries for multiple platforms, not games.

Is there are reason they're saying Libraries, and not games?

eg. do games made with Unity tend to "just work" on many platforms regardless of these choices, whilst Libraries might be doing more exotic stuff?

 

Where?

 

"...libraries which aim for cross-platform compatibility should target the .NET Standard 2.0 profile."

 

Before that section:

Oh and BTW, it's all about using Unity. There is very little difference if you're writing a library (managed or source code) versus making a game.

 

Do you think it might be a typo, that they meant to write game, but were so busy talking about libraries of APIs that the word was on their brain for too long?

 

Thanks for the answer; So what are we suppose to take when we want to integrate FIREBASE package (dotnet4) ?

 

Just to chime in on my findings on this discussion. From the site (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/dotnet-standard) ".NET and .NET Core" was mentioned and I was confused whats the difference between .NET and .NET Core turns out MS renamed .NET Core to .NET when they updated from .NET (Core) 3.1 to .NET 5. They skipped the numbering "4" to avoid confusion with the .NET Framework numbering (.NET Framework version uses 4.x). So basically .NET Core and .NET they refer to the same thing (now).

Sauce: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotnet-5

 

Can somebody lend a hand please.

I'm using Unity for offline rendering via Unity recorder only.

I'm installing an asset from asset store and part of the requirement is to set player > Api Compatibility Level to .Net 4.x

Now I'm on Unity 2022.2.0a10 and there are only 2 options:
.NET Standard 2.1
.NET Framework

....no .Net 4.x

How do I get .NET 4.x to show in the list?

 

Is there a difference in performance between .NET 2 and .NET 4?

 

This is a truly excellent response. Thank you so very much.

 

I would say CLR and more importantly JIT compiler is of most importance.

And it's here we will see the biggest improvemt when we finaly move from Mono CLR to Core CLR