The pros and cons of LabVIEW

[smercurio_fc]

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mikeporter wrote:

So yes there are versions  of other languges that financially and philisophically free, but they would impose far longer development cycles, and for me my time has value. Hence, for me the cost of a "free" development environment is far greater than what I pay to NI for a LV license.

Mike...

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It's too bad that sometimes one cannot convince managers of this simple fact.

[stha]

We readched the same comclusion about Tortoise and we deployed it too. My point was that NI does not support it natively. I think we can conclude that it falls in the 'cons' category even though you have a work around.

I understand your argumentation about pt 5. And I admit that for some particular problems, LV might be the fastest way to provide a solution and the cost would be justified. In the other hand, I believe NI would gain if the plateform was more open. For example, if the VI was stored in text format, I'm sure we would see dozen of tools developed by the community to perform all kind of tasks (a more efficient merging tool maybe?). At the moment, we are limited to the speed at which NI can provide tools. That might not be an issue for many of you. But again, I believe it falls in the 'cons' category.

For the rest, I'm glad to learn that scripting is possible and I will certainly look into it. Once you tasted the power of continuous integration though automatisation and scripting, you dont want to live without it.

I'm dragging this thread away from its original goal of listing pros and cons, so I will continue asking questions in appropriate threads. Thanks for your insight anyway. You see, all I needed was education

Regards,

[DaniDin]

Hey-

Googled "Use Beyond Compare in Labview" and hit your post from 4 years ago.

Are you still on this planet?

Can I use, or invoke, the Beyond Compare application from within Labview in order to compare captured test data with some golden data file? If so can you point to some useful links?

Thanks!

Don

[AKA_TG]

I been using LV since version 1 on the Macintosh.

I can only think about Pro's although I have yelled at NI on many occasions thinking they somehow screw up my program. Most times when it all fares out it is usually something I overlooked. THe exception is version 8.2.1 (for me that version cost me many hours of shear frustration with LVOOP and type definitions in general)

* UI elements easy to work with and for the simple stuff it can't be beat.

* String display capability second to none (my experience)

That kind of display makes it opossible to momnitor all kinds fof strings from instruments etc..

* Memory management is transparent but can be controlled or at least made predictable for very large data sets using in placeness designs.

* Ability to program relatively complex functions with little effort.

* LV supports Engineers who do not have enough time to master C++ or C#.

* LV gives more bang for the buck than other languages wrt data acquisition and other instrumentation.(my experience)

cons Not many for my experience

LV also allows one to program very badly on short term projects or quick and dirty programs and you still get a working answer.

LV hides its displeasure very nicely.

The name is so entrenched with 'play toy' or 'Arcade like' interface.

[ngarneski]

Pros:

-Simple instrument communication

-Low development overhead for simple UI construction

-Integrates well with .net

-Well established template for instrument communciation libraries(LV drivers), and the fact that they are most often open source helps debug alot. Libraries for competing languages like .net are usually close sourced, with no real standard set of functions and expected behavior

-Great text manipulation libraries. Scan to/from string and full regex in an easy to use fashion. A million times more readable than perl and just as powerful. 

-Most intuitive paradigm for multithreading I have yet to see in a language

Cons:

-Runtime is enormous and not commonly found on end users computer

-UI programming can be unflexable: making dynamic interfaces feels to me much more akward than in languages like C# .net or JAVA. It feels like I am often taping different UI elements together to get the exact functionality I need. 

-Code files are not portable: labview will not even attempt to open files newer than itself, and nothing can compare to the portability of a text file; you can edit from a cell phone etc.

Despite the con's overall I think labview is a good language for many applications. 

[Yamaeda]

Pros:

Anyone can write programs in LV.

Cons:

Anyone writes program in LV.

/Y

[Ranjeet_Singh]

Its been 3 years I am programming in labview. 

According to me labview is best for GUI programming atleast better then .net. but what I sad it is not cross compiler. Most of the functions are already there which is good for time saving.

[Hooovahh]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

Pros:

Anyone can write programs in LV.

Cons:

Anyone writes program in LV.

/Y

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In that same vein

Pros:

Very hardware oriented

Cons:

Very hardware oriented

As a result there are very little LabVIEW applications made that don't use hardware (VIPM WOOT).

[altenbach]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

As a result there are very little LabVIEW applications made that don't use hardware (VIPM WOOT).

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About 95% of my programs (small sample) are hardware free (except for computing hardware, of course :D) 🙂

I mostly use LabVIEW for pure computations. LabVIEW performs fantastically, and scales very well with the number of available CPU cores. These programs would be difficult to implement in traditional programming langugages. Of course, after 27 years, LabVIEW has a lot of tradition too. 😉

[Neos]

well it is a pain to share

Pros - LabVIEW is far ahead of text based programming languages for the applications i have used so for 

Cons - Daily it takes me either 1 comment , 1 hour or 1 discussion with the people that in any terms except faster development time LabVIEW is not good as any text based languages............

Let them say whatever they want may be some day they will also understand DATAFLOW