Unity API History (using GitHub)

A long long time ago Unity used to include an API History with the script reference. It was pretty basic but a great resource to discover new APIs that were added and for keeping a watch on APIs that got removed.

Unfortunately, starting with Unity 5.1, the history was no longer updated and later removed. I always wanted to have a replacement but all the tools I tried were hard to use or platform restricted.

Inspired by rn-diff-purge, I created a replacement. A GitHub repository that has branches for the latest major versions that contain the decompiled public API (currently only from UnityEngine.dll):

https://github.com/sttz/unity-api-diff

Using GitHub's compare feature, it's possible to compare the API between arbitrary Unity versions. It's still only a rough proof of concept but I hope it's already useful to some!

 

nice!

just saw this useful tool also,
https://sabresaurus.com/unity-api-versioner/

 

Yeah, Sabresaurus' tool is useful on a different axis!

It can also be done with the official documentation now, albeit clunkily and with less granularity: When you go to a page in the script reference and open the new versions menu, it will display all versions but only the ones that have the selected API have a proper link, the others point to the script reference's index. So you can hover over the links and check the urls to see in which Unity versions an API is available.

I mostly use my tool to see new additions to the API. The release notes can be a bit terse for this and often don't mention all the additions. This allows to have a quick overview of what has been added and shows you the full signature of the class/member.