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Godot 4.8-dev survey (vs our 4.7.2 engine reform)

Godot 4.8-dev survey

Section titled “Godot 4.8-dev survey”

Research, 2026-10-11 (subagent, read-only). Context: we’re reforming the tvOS fork onto 4.7.2-stable (branch tvos-4.7.2, ~/Claude/godot-tvos/godot-472) before the P3 gamut patch (docs/superpowers/plans/2026-10-11-hdr-p3-gamut.md).

Status

Section titled “Status”
  • [Certain] Master is 4.8.dev. There are no 4.8 tags or releases yet. Seven dev snapshots have shipped: dev1 Jul 6 through dev7 Sep 29 (https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-8-dev-7/).
  • [Certain] dev7 declared feature freeze. There’s no beta or RC yet.
  • [Guessing] Beta in October, stable around Nov-Dec 2026. No date is stated anywhere.

What matters to us

Section titled “What matters to us”
  • [Certain] No P3 or wide gamut in 4.8. blit.glsl on master is unchanged since 2026-02-12 and still clamps negatives to 0. Our gamut patch is needed on any base.
  • [Certain] tvOS is not landing in 4.8. #118332 and #123242 are both OPEN on milestone 4.x, and reviewers want the Apple-embedded platforms unified first. Keep the fork.
  • [Certain] #121392 (merged ~Aug 31) is a Metal rework: barrier sync replaces hazard tracking, with reported equal-or-better perf on A12/A18/M1/M4. It’s attractive for the ATV. It’s also the first suspect for new Metal artifacts, and it would conflict with our fork’s Metal commits on a 4.8 rebase.
  • [Certain] #123082 changes the iOS reference white from 203 to 100 nits in 4.8 (deliberately not backported to 4.7.x). The iOS luminance getters change, so re-check HdrLook headroom maths on a 4.8 move.
  • Shader export: #120968 (deterministic baked shaders), #124058 (compressed embedded shaders), #123312 (Forward Mobile shader-compile deadlock fix).
  • Core/GDScript perf: #122596 (1.6x Object property access), #123810/#123701.

Breaking for a 4.7 project

Section titled “Breaking for a 4.7 project”
  • #121833: string literals used as comments are disallowed in GDScript.
  • #121030: minimum iOS 15 and macOS 13 (we’re already at iOS 15).
  • #123082: iOS HDR luminance numbers (above).

Recommendation

Section titled “Recommendation”

Reform on 4.7.2 now. It’s stable, and none of 4.8’s changes are needed for P3. Revisit 4.8 at stable. The Metal rework (#121392) is the main reason to move, and it needs an ATV perf ABBA plus a hand-merge against the fork’s Metal commits.