Rif.: Is there a new version of Labwindows 2023 planned?

[Hajado]

Good morning,

I ask you one thing: is there expected to be a new version of Labwindows, perhaps version 2022/2023, or is it a software that is about to be abandoned in favor of Labview?

I would like an official answer if possible, before buying a license.

Thanks in advance.

[RobertoBozzolo]

Rumors are there that CVI is at end. I don't think you can get an official response from NI in the near future: we haven't got any even if forcefully asking for it (e.g. this discussion).

Even without considering that a single NI employee stating "To my knowledge" cannot be taken as NI official position, the crude facts sadly seem to enforce those rumors. 😢

[Wolfgang]

From NI support channels one also can hear that patches are what still may be expected in the next future, but no new releases.

In any case, I would consider an official statement from NI just fair - one still can buy the software, even with a 3 year subscription, or extend an existing SSP - to me this implies false hopes, a rip-off. And everyone should be aware that this is not a sustainable business model.

[Wolfgang]

Again the status (no new releases for the near future, only patches) has been confirmed by NI, with the added comment that the customer base is considered too small.

Given the visible, declining forum activities I actually also had this impression.

I do not know what 'too small' means in terms of sold licenses, but if one could manage to have a petition signed by say 1000 engineers/scientists NI might reconsider their decision. Is this realistic?

Rewriting lot's of proven code due to a forced migration away from CVI is not what we, the still existing customer base, are anticipating - so what could we do for a win-win situation?

For sure, there would be more customers left if CVI would not have been neglected that much in recent years, it is a negative feedback loop. But would there be sufficiently more customers even if CVI would be modernized (64 bit, current C language support, updated graphics...)? C itself is still widely used in science, the language is expected to see a major revision (C23) - but students are taught Python, not C. Would a support of, e.g., C++ change much?

....

[santo_13]

Not a CVI guy, but just sharing my 2 cents, for an organization of NI's size, any investment made in product development must be backed by a strong sales order book. If the revenue from CVI sales is not large enough, from a business standpoint, the executives are not going to be motivated to mobilize an army of engineers to develop new versions.

I guess, the revenue from CVI might have been diminishing in recent years and the Executives would have mobilized the engineering bandwidth on a more profitable domain.

About your question, would a 1000-user petition warrant an eye from NI, maybe, maybe not, it depends on what revenue these 1000 users bring in per year to the expense incurred to bring this revenue from 1000 users.

[GabelDaniel]

NI Deliberately neglect CVI for the last 10 years or so.

I attended in about 8 NI week conferences and the word CVI never mentioned be any keynote speaker

In all the 4 days of NI week their was only one presentation of CVI .but for L.V there were  dozens.

2Nd . in all the H.W presentations some of the products does NOT have driver for C. I asked the presenter 

about driver for CVI -> some of them did not even know what CVI is.

3Rd . In one of the NI week i attended i was fortuned to meet NI SW vice president (or other high ranking manage) together

with US NAVY and AIR FORCE people.

I asked the NI manager why they do not give a driver for L.V FPGA for C. under the L.V layer there is already C layer -> just put out

this layer to CVI users. his response was -> in L.V we make more money

so NI can not cry that there is not enough customers . they i directly response to that development across the years.

on my part i never migrate to any other NI SW IDE . i will go to C++ or  C# with MS free platforms.

Gabel Daniel

with CVI from V 3.1 

[rolfk]

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@GabelDaniel wrote:

3Rd . In one of the NI week i attended i was fortuned to meet NI SW vice president (or other high ranking manage) together

with US NAVY and AIR FORCE people.

I asked the NI manager why they do not give a driver for L.V FPGA for C. under the L.V layer there is already C layer -> just put out

this layer to CVI users. his response was -> in L.V we make more money

---

Well, there is a C driver for Compact RIO at least. And it is documented and used by the Python FPGA interface. As such it is simply a matter of including the correct header file and calling those functions. And you could even create a function panel interface if you were so inclined.

Creating the FPGA and realtime personality of the target is of course another matter. Even for the Python interface, that part needs to be done in LabVIEW as it is the only IDE that can easily create that code for the target (and be accessed with the Compact RIO API).

And yes NI has decided to let CVI go. But that is not just a one sided story. It is very hard to compete with free development environments like Visual Studio Code. Sure, LabWindows/CVI offers features that you simply won't find elsewhere, but most new users won't pay money if they can get away with a free solution that has a very broad community backing, even when they have to live without those features, that they don't know about and never really will miss because of that, but even if they knew about them they would still choose the free beer above the costly cognac.

For NI a free LabWindows/CVI would not make sense, they need to earn money with the products they create and with their change in direction, the former model of subsidizing software with the sale of their excellent but expensive hardware has pretty much gone.

[Hajado]

I don't understand then the sense of still selling the licenses (at a high price) for Labwindows ....

[rolfk]

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@Hajado wrote:

I don't understand then the sense of still selling the licenses (at a high price) for Labwindows ....

---

You mean for the LabWindows/CVI license? Probably because you don't get FPGA development for free in LabVIEW either. You need to buy an additional LabVIEW FPGA Toolkit license to be able to compile FGPA code, and an additional LabVIEW Realtime license if you happen to use one of the cRIO or similar real-time controllers with their own OS, to write the control application for them.

You could of course say that the absence of a LabWindows/CVI driver interface for the CompactRIO (or FlexRIO) driver is a major drawback. But I consider that a rather inflated opinion. It's similar to stating that LabWindows/CVI is worthless, because it doesn't come out of the box with a driver for your favorite 12-axis multi purpose joystick.

They could of course create a function panel interface for CompactRIO. It's not rocket science and just a bit of time to do it. But there are other considerations:

- How many CVI users would want that? Considering that you still need LabVIEW to do the actual FPGA programming.

- If they did that, the next complaint would be that it is worthless when you can't also compile an FPGA program from CVI or a (free of course) tool that comes with this function panel interface. Which is of course nonsense as the needed Xilinx compiler isn't free either and the integration cost in such a CVI based tool would be VERY costly too.

At this point it's an academic question. If you want to control an FPGA program through CompactRIO, it certainly can be done with very little extra effort. The API is there and documented, you only won't have function panels that you can select and let generate source code for the call. Other than that it is simply usable.

But LabWindows/CVI is not going to be further maintained, and in that aspect it is certainly valid to say that you would be badly advised to consider it for a new project. And you can feel angry about that, or sad, but it is a simple fact that products can and regularly get obsolete. There are people who have to maintain existing projects written with LabWindows/CVI. They still can buy a license if they want to. The option to make LabWindows/CVI open source does not exist. It's way to much effort to cleanup its code base from code modules that NI would not have a license to distribute its source code for in addition to the general cleanup needed for such an action to remove sensitive information in code and comments that were never meant for public consumption. Making it a free download also has not a big chance. That would require actual changes and investment in changing the license code and servers to allow for this type of operation. Anyone proposing to spend more money to give something away for free would be lion fodder for the bean counters in finance control.

[mcfischer]

A bit late for the party (or should I say funeral)... Given that we'll see the end of LabWindows in not too distant future, what are the options for folks who prefer an actual programming language (i.e. not LV)? I don't really care about the function panels and help (nice to have, but I can do without). I know that at least some of the drivers (DAQmx, GPIB, and such) come with a library that are C/C++ "compatible" and could be called from MS Visual Studio Code. The functions in the advanced analysis library are maybe some of the easier ones to find (not sure, though), but what about all the GUI graphs, controls, etc., tons of utilities, etc.? Did anyone make the jump yet and can share the experience?

Martin