Is there a new version of Labwindows 2023 planned?FFFDddd

[@lain29]

Hello all,

Having problems with my CVI license, I took advantage of the technical support to ask the question of the future of Labwindows/CVI. Here is their answer :

"I dug deeper into this LabWindows/CVI topic and what I found is not so promising, unfortunately. There are no plans to further develop LabWindows/CVI. I don't know the reason but this is the official statement right now. It seems like in 2025 it will be fully stopped. For further details, please visit the following page: Software Product Lifecycle Policies"

Bad news I’m afraid.

Alain

[NIExpert]

@paul.knight@zeroavia.com

Curious if you found a good drag and drop GUI tool with code generation.  I learned about PyQt and LabDeck but haven't tried either and from what I can tell, PyQT may require the commercial license which is quite pricey

[macksel]

Is there any chance to port all the CVI functions to Eclipse or something else? Otherwise we will eventually have a big problem with newer versions of Windows.

[rolfk]

It’s not quite clear what you ask for. Creating libraries that implement all the LabWindows/CVI function, while an enormous work, could theoretically be done. But porting of major parts of the LabWIndows/CVI editor environment to Eclipse or VSCode is probably equivalent to rewriting most of LabWindows/CVI from scratch. Maybe you can get a crazy guy with to much money to spend a few 10 millions for such a project but it may be still very hard to find enough suitable programmers to pull this off in a manner that it gets finished in less than 10 years.

[macksel]

Thanks for your answer. To clarify it:

We have been working with CVI for many years now and have created many Windows programs with it, a few of which we are currently developing/supporting. The simple question then is, of course, what do we do if a new Windows or an update is released and CVI 2020 no longer works? We cannot port all our programs to another IDE because we use lot of the CVI functions and the panels! 

So maybe it would be possible, to port some of the NI/CVI library (e.g. toolbox, UIR) to use it in another IDE e.g. Virtual Studio or something else. Maybe we can convert the uir files to Visual Studio panel files or something else?

[rolfk]

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@macksel wrote:

So maybe it would be possible, to port some of the NI/CVI library (e.g. toolbox, UIR) to use it in another IDE e.g. Virtual Studio or something else. Maybe we can convert the uir files to Visual Studio panel files or something else?

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Possible for sure. But extremely work intense. The toolbox library would be probably quite doable but especially the UIR library is going to be a major resource black hole if you try to reimplement that. I'm not qualified to make a real estimate here, but I think 100 grand for just a reimplementation of the UIR library with reasonable support of the LabWindows/CVI features sans some more esoteric corner cases, would definitely not be enough. And then? You also need an UIR editor of some sorts which is quite a beast too.

Add to that all the other libraries, function panels for the libraries, editors for that etc. and you could probably spend the rest of your life on that, but only if you also hire a few good programmers.

Do you see where that leads? Are you willing to sink several 100 k of money into this, or are you just hoping someone else will do all the work for you?

[macksel]

I completely agree with you, although that is really, really bad news. Then we only can hope that the software will continue to run on future Windows versions (we always use Industrie PCs with LTSC) for a long time.

There would still be a possibility. NI/Emerson publishes the source code to the community (possibly on Github).But the chances are probably rather slim. And I don't know how big the CVI community is.

[rolfk]

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@macksel wrote:

There would still be a possibility. NI/Emerson publishes the source code to the community (possibly on Github).But the chances are probably rather slim. And I don't know how big the CVI community is.

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Unmaintained source code on Github is IMHO worse than no source code. And there is really nobody who would actively maintain it. Why would anybody from NI do it? And who else would be capable and motivated enough to go through a source code base that has organically grown over more than 30 years? Also there are certainly things in the current source code that NI can't or doesn't want to get into the public.

Think about licensed code libraries they use. Licensed for their own commercial use but not for publishing anywhere. Or information gotten under NDA. Or simply inappropriate remarks by past developers that could be very bad news if gotten into the public under the current scrutiny about correct language. Lots and lots of things to consider, consult with umpteen lawyers and prune from the existing code base before it could even be considered for publishing on something like Github. The by far cheapest solution is to simply do nothing.

[richferrara1]

I'm going through the same thing at my company. We have a bunch of LabWindows-based applications that we use to test our radar software. Since we're in the process of upgrading our development PCs to Windows 10 (and eventually 11), we can't rely on LabWindows being further maintained and supported. So I've spent the past few months porting everything over to Qt Creator and rewriting a lot of our test application code almost from scratch, since it means changing not just IDEs but languages (from C to C++).

[vix]

When you think about using Qt, consider the license terms.

Some of their software modules are available either on GPL or Commercial license only.

And if you distribute "devices" (i.e., your application running on a specific hardware distributed by you) you must pay royalties for every device (or go GPL).

I see that a lot of people thinks that Qt can be used free of charge, but it's not 100% sure.

A lot of points should be considered.