September 22nd, 2020

🚀 Zenject, now known as Extenject is a dependency injection framework built specifically for Unity. Check out my previous post on dependency injection if you don't what know it is.

🧠 Completely free under the MIT license, Zenject allows you to loosely couple code and increase the flexibility of your code.

💻 Features
📌 Inject variables directly into MonoBehaviors and C# classes.
📌 Conditionally bind variables by type, name, parent, and more.
📌 Dynamically create objects via factories.
📌 Setup memory pools for object pooling.
📌 Unit test support and framework for easily testing your scenes and prefabs.

😃 My Experience
📌 Zenject makes it easy to swap out dependencies for different instances, making it easier to change feature requirements on the fly.
📌 It can be a pain integrating external assets and hooking them up to the dependency tree.
📌 There have been some strange show-stopping bugs, but the framework has greatly improved stability.
📌 Performance overhead exists, and diving into the Zenject source code will cause headaches.
📌 Onboarding a new developer takes longer, especially if they have no experience with Zenject.
📌 Once you get rolling with Zenject, it becomes extremely powerful, flexible, and can definitely help game developers in rapid agile development.

🤞 Features I want
📌 The ability to visualize the dependency graph anywhere and anytime.
📌 More internal optimizations: bye-bye FindObjectsOfType for ZenjectComponent.

✅ Conclusion If you're doing a lot of OOP, then dependency injection is awesome. It does take time to wrap your head around Zenject and how a certain project is using it. I think it's a good option, but an option I'm not going to use in my current solo games. In a project with loose ever-changing requirements, using Zenject will definitely pay off. Just know that it's not yet widely adopted, and the average Unity Developer will need extra time to learn.

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