To cite Sam Taggart: "A good refactoring suite for LabVIEW is desperately needed. IMO the worst offenders are classes/interfaces", taking the words out of my mouth.
Good tooling for automated refactoring can speed up development and reduce risk of making mistakes. By automating tedious tasks the developer may focus on design over housekeeping. Most other languages have good tools for refactoring through various IDE:s, and there is not really any reason we could not have that as well.
I'm sure there are a lot of tools out there I am not aware of, which could be leveraged. I think the right tools should be collected or developed, to be put into a suite of high quality refactoring tools.
Submitter
Anton Sundqvist
LabVIEW Compatibility
LabVIEW 2020 (first version supporting interfaces)
How would the user interact with this tool?
Through suitable LabVIEW project integration.
Distribution Method
VI Package (.vip)
Development Target Cost
$?
Other Notes
I'm happy to work on this myself together with whomever wants to contribute. I think we need some community guidance and suggestions for what tools are needed and how they should be implemented in LabVIEW. The purpose of this post is to gauge the interest within the community and gather ideas.
I'll start with a few tools I would like to see, let's see if we can get it rolling:
- Extract interface from class
- Override and save all must override VI:s
- Generate constructors/destructors (not that they are strictly needed, but they are useful for communicating intent. Using them by convention makes it easier to locate each place a class is instantiated, compared to block-dropping)