For how long will Godot 3.x be supported?

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:bust_in_silhouette: Asked By tom555

Hello Godotters,

does anybody know for how long will the Godot 3.x be supported into the future?

Thanks :slight_smile:

I have projects (some old, some new), specifically my VR apps, that will always be on 3.x, as 4.x has less complete VR support. The porting effort would be unrealistically hard, and I have zero interest in doing so.

Hopefully there will never be such extreme incompatibilities ever again. I used to be a huge Qt supporter, but I abandoned it after two major API breakages made it infeasible to maintain my older programs. I had a dozen large programs, and it took a whole year to port just one of the programs from Qt 3.x to Qt 4.

A note to Godot developers: it’s the API, it’s the API, it’s the API. When I dropped Qt, I went back to Java. That’s because Java is 100% backwards compatible. It’s not as performant as other languages, but its API is completely stable. My time is valuable, and I’m not going to spend it chasing API breakages. A stable API is equally important to (if not more important than) performance and feature improvements. To quote Linus Torvalds about Linux, “If a change results in user programs breaking, it’s a bug.” And another of his bedrock rules is “WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!”

The Godot 3.x to 4 API breakage is perhaps the only pass Godot will be allowed by the userbase at large. For all our sakes, I hope this never happens again. With the growing Godot userbase, a repeat will likely result in a userbase revolt. For better or for worse, Godot is now a professionally-oriented and respected project, with all the benefits and responsibilities that come along with that status.

stormreaver | 2023-05-20 11:24

:bust_in_silhouette: Reply From: jgodfrey

I’m not aware of any specific end dates for the support of Godot 3.x. The best I could find is this statement:

The 3.6 release is still planned and should be the last stable branch of Godot 3.x. It will be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, which we plan to support for as long as users still need it (due to missing features in Godot 4.x, or having published games which they need to keep updating for platform requirements).

Form this section of the docs