Finally:
Finally the first stable release of Unity 2018.1 is out (you can get it from here)
New Features:
There are a lot of new features to get excited about and you can have a look at the main changes here
or in the release notes for more detail.
IL2CPP:
But there is one feature i have personally been waiting for for a long time and it seems to be one of the more unknown ones so i wanted to draw some attention tho this.
So what is IL2CPP:
For now unity games where not compiled as native code and did rely on the .net framework. At least on Windows. Android users had the IL2CPP scripting backend in previous versions. But now it is available for Windows and Mac as well.
The IL2CPP scripting backend basicly does what the name suggests: it takes c# IL code and converts it to c++ code that can be compiled to native code.
What are the benefits:
Here are the main benefits from my point of view:
-Not that easy to decompile/reverse (better piracy protection)
-faster
-might bring the possibility to work with lower level methods in the future
-doesnt depend on .net (so the gamer doesnt have to install it just to play the game)
So that was it from my part :) I hope you enjoy the new release as much as i do.
As you can see in the release notes there is a lot of new exciting stuff to discover.