Feature Request Please let me change burst settings like Safety Checks before enabling Burst

- The options in the burst menu are disabled when Enabled Compilation is unchecked.
- As soon as I Enable Compilation, it starts compiling.
- I don't want to start compiling until I set some settings, like Safety Checks.

-> Could you please let me change the burst settings while Burst is disabled, so when I enable burst it compiles what I want it to?

Cheers.

 

Could you explain why you don‘t want it to compile right away?

I don’t see a compelling use case for this. The compilation is a background process and typically finishes within seconds, so you neither have to wait nor is it going to spin up fans or something - at least not in my experience. Besides, one rarely toggles Burst on/off to begin with, even less often would you change settings in between.

 

It uses near 100% CPU for around 3 minutes on a full compile in my project. But the actual problem is when I change safety settings triggering a recompile it locks input for a while, 10 seconds or so, but up to a minute! After that 10-60 seconds, unity is not as responsive as it's still compiling with as much CPU as it can get its hands on.

So, if burst is off with safety setting on, and I want to do a test with burst on, safety off, I have to enable, wait 10-60 seconds then toggle safety, and start recompiling again.

Now, this alone wouldn't be a big deal, but you bring me to my second point with your question about rarity of switching.

In an ideal world, burst would just stay on 24/7, especially with break points working in burst context now. But we do not live in such a world. We live in a world of alphas, betas, experimental features. Burst doesn't always work, so we toggle to test (even if just to eliminate burst as a suspect), we re-enable after restarting editor with a cleared burst cache, sometimes we just want to see the performance difference of something without recompiling burst attributes.

Finally, even with burst maturing a lot, there are still cases where the burst cache can get corrupted. Interrupting a compile with a new compile adds to that risk, especially when you are going through cycles and cycles of editor restarts and Burst cache clears, and just went to minimise problems as much as possible.

At the end of the day though, I would have saved a LOT of time lately if I could toggle safety before burst with the huge amount of editor crashes I've been getting and trying to debug. Even the annoyance of that 10-60 seconds is enough of a reason though imo.

The only reason I'm posting is because a use case was compelling enough (it irritated me enough) to bring me here, and a "me too" from my co-worker sealed the deal.

 

Cool, thanks for sharing it in detail! 3 Minutes is quite a lot but then maybe my projects weren't that Burst-heavy after all.

One idea: I believe there is an API for the Burst compiler settings. If I am correct, you could simply write your [MenuItem] methods that makes the Burst setting changes and on/off toggle all at once. If no such API exists but given this is for your own project it may be worthwhile digging through Unity internal methods and using reflection to achieve that menu item idea.

 

Yeah I was actually considering my own menu to do it myself anyway... figured I'd ask here as well .