How We Made Variable Inspections 87 Times Faster for Unreal Engine in Rider | The .NET Tools Blog

The blog post discusses the significant improvements made to variable inspection speed in the Rider development tool for Unreal Engine, achieving a performance enhancement of up to 87 times faster on warm runs and 16 times faster on cold ones, along with a reduction in debugger memory usage to just over a third of its previous consumption. This was accomplished by rewriting the expression evaluator to replace the reliance on LLDB's Clang-based evaluator, which was slow and difficult to maintain, especially with complex Natvis expressions used for type visualization in debugging. The new evaluator not only improves performance but also enhances reliability, notably with core dumps, and is available in the Rider 2026.1 Early Access Program. These advancements also bring performance boosts to other debugging features like conditional breakpoints, making the debugging process more efficient for developers working on large Unreal Engine projects.