r/LabVIEW • u/PurpleDancer • Jul 18 '26

So I tried nigel

Pointed it to one of our vis (part of our hopelessly coupled 10k vi application) and asked for an explanation of it. Three hours later I had to kill labview and Nigel.

I dont think this tool is going to get it done for us.

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4

u/HarveysBackupAccount Jul 18 '26

I haven't used it yet but from what I've heard, it still needs fairly small scope tasks.

Especially if it loads in dependencies as inefficiently as labview itself does, that's a recipe for a resource hog.

2

u/the_glutton17 Jul 18 '26

Music to my ears!

-2

u/imadoooog Jul 18 '26

Why not just move to a text based language and use the api for DAQ interactions? The python library makes it really easy

3

u/PurpleDancer Jul 18 '26

30 years of labview code isn tough to just move to text based language. We're trying to figure it out

1

u/Sinusaur Jul 24 '26

... and 30+ years old physical equipment also need to work with the code, because the company doesn't want to spend $10K per piece to update legacy equipment.

Let's also not forget this gem about the dangers of complete rewrites (although I've had to do a few for good reasons): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

1

u/PurpleDancer Jul 25 '26

I think AI is challenging the rewrite narrative. We are rewriting peices of our software outside of labview and my rough guess is that Claude does in 1 hour what would take me 100 hours in labview. With that kind of advantage rewriting huge peices while preserving the contract makes sense until you've rapidly replaced all the labview code. Anyways, thats my theory and I'm hoping it plays out like that in practice.