4 ms·

I had some experience with LabVIEW for FIRST Robotics, and I honestly hated it. I could fit so much fewer code on a screen, making it harder to debug/understand

I had some experience with LabVIEW for FIRST Robotics, and I honestly hated it. I could fit so much fewer code on a screen, making it harder to debug/understand, and the compile times were absolutely horrific. (2 hours for the robot equivalent of "Hello, World!" is really unacceptable) The following year we switched to C++, which compiled in <10s on the same machine. Supposedly LabVIEW got some performance tweaks, but we didn't bother to check back with it. So while I never used the multithreading aspects of it (And I can see how they would work, variables are passed in such a way to explicitly lay out what modifies them), I can easily see people having issues with LabVIEW.

slacka 13y ago
Yes, it's true LV has its own issues. It's a memory hog and the UI is cluttered. Reminds me of where JavaScript was before V8 came out. My experience was very different from yours. I couldn't believe how simple it was to add an additional test in parallel. It was just a copy/paste, update the functions, test parameters, and I/O. If only writing multithreaded code was that simple. After my experience, I could see how LV could be a good fit for computer vision apps running on highly parallel architectures. It's too bad there aren't any other modern, open dataflow languages out there. I wonder how much research academia has put into dataflow concurrency.
- DuskStar 13y ago
  Oh I definitely agree with you there! LabVIEW was amazingly easy to just grab and run with,and I didn't have any issues with the language design. I think it's something with a ton of potential (especially for writing multithreaded code), it just needs to compile large programs faster (maybe precompile functions you import from libraries?) and shrink the default spacing between elements. I wouldn't call LabVIEW open, though - isn't a retail copy close to $3000? (might be another reason it isn't as commonly used)
- gruseom 13y ago
  I wonder how much research academia has put into dataflow concurrency. Me too! Anybody here know about this?
- octo_t 13y ago
  Read this paper: http://pdf.aminer.org/000/055/177/static_tokens_using_dataflow_to_automate_concurrent_pipeline_synthesis.pdf http://pdf.aminer.org/000/055/177/static_tokens_using_datafl... If you want more: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1458143&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1458143 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=145814... http://web.njit.edu/~ziavras/MICPRO-2002.pdf http://web.njit.edu/~ziavras/MICPRO-2002.pdf http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cop4020/sum2012/COP4020_Lecture10.pdf http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cop4020/sum2012/COP4020_Lectur...

slacka 13y ago

Yes, it's true LV has its own issues. It's a memory hog and the UI is cluttered. Reminds me of where JavaScript was before V8 came out. My experience was very different from yours. I couldn't believe how simple it was to add an additional test in parallel. It was just a copy/paste, update the functions, test parameters, and I/O. If only writing multithreaded code was that simple. After my experience, I could see how LV could be a good fit for computer vision apps running on highly parallel architectures. It's too bad there aren't any other modern, open dataflow languages out there. I wonder how much research academia has put into dataflow concurrency.

DuskStar 13y ago
Oh I definitely agree with you there! LabVIEW was amazingly easy to just grab and run with,and I didn't have any issues with the language design. I think it's something with a ton of potential (especially for writing multithreaded code), it just needs to compile large programs faster (maybe precompile functions you import from libraries?) and shrink the default spacing between elements. I wouldn't call LabVIEW open, though - isn't a retail copy close to $3000? (might be another reason it isn't as commonly used)
gruseom 13y ago
I wonder how much research academia has put into dataflow concurrency. Me too! Anybody here know about this?
octo_t 13y ago
Read this paper: http://pdf.aminer.org/000/055/177/static_tokens_using_dataflow_to_automate_concurrent_pipeline_synthesis.pdf http://pdf.aminer.org/000/055/177/static_tokens_using_datafl... If you want more: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1458143&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1458143 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=145814... http://web.njit.edu/~ziavras/MICPRO-2002.pdf http://web.njit.edu/~ziavras/MICPRO-2002.pdf http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cop4020/sum2012/COP4020_Lecture10.pdf http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cop4020/sum2012/COP4020_Lectur...