Lifecycle (term)
2025/12/27
- Type
- Learning Resource
- Format
- Glossary Article
- Version
- General
- Subject Tags
- Created
- Updated
- 2026/02/16
- 2025/12/27
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.
