Copy LinkCopied!Lifecycle (term)

In OOP parlance, the term "lifecycle" refers to the logic governing creation, lifetime, and destruction of an object.

For example, when opening a file, GDScript needs to:

• Get a handle to the file
• Read the file and store the results somewhere in memory
• Close the file
• Release the memory

Often, in GDScript, we talk of "lifecycle" when discussing the order in which functions are called during the node lifecycle. For example, when a node is added to the scene tree, the _enter_tree() function is called. When the node is removed from the scene tree, the _exit_tree() function is called. Other objects rarely have a lifecycle per se, even if all objects have at least the _init() function.