Open Source the LabVIEW Plotting Tools

[BertMcMahan]

There are lots of very old Idea Exchange entries for plots that seem very promising.

Some of these go back to 2009, and this wasn't an exhaustive search. Some of these ideas were posted before some of our forum members were even born! 😉

That handful I picked has a total of 317 Kudos- but they're spread out over a large number of individual posts, so this Idea entry is sort of a combo of all of them. Basically, there are LOTS of great ideas from the community, but unfortunately most don't get any traction from NI.

The request is to Open Source the plotting tools, similarly to the Icon Editor or the Actor Framework. I know I'd be thrilled to be able to hack around with the plots. I'm sure there are some gnarly secrets under the hood, but that's part of the fun 🙂

[crossrulz]

My general thought is that anything written in G should be a candidate for open source. I tend against anything that is at the C/C++/C# layer of the IDE being open sourced.

[BertMcMahan]

I'd tend to agree with that. I don't know if the plotting stuff has anything other than G in it. It looks/feels like an XControl, but I don't think the source is available anywhere so who knows.

[Petru_Tarabuta]

+1. "My general thought is that anything written in G should be a candidate for open source. I tend against anything that is at the C/C++/C# layer of the IDE being open sourced." - I too tend to prefer that LabVIEW IDE components written in G are open sourced first. At the same time I am for components not written in G to be open-sourced too, where applicable/possible. This would enable respected members of the LabVIEW community that are deeply familiar with other languages - for example Rolf Kalbermatter, Andrey Dmitriev, James McNally, John Medland, Stephen Loftus-Mercer - to make contributions to those components. It might also enable LabVIEW programmers who have a little, but not much, experience with text-based languages to contribute where they can. For example, I have a little C# experience having dabbled in it. I would be tempted to contribute to a C# based feature if the codebase is not too daunting.