It brings lots of OpenCV's feature detection tools in like QR codes, OCR, Deep Neural Network and a wild number of Barcode formats thanks to ZXingC++ as well as the Open CV Calibration and Homography stuff. Did I mention it also has video encoding and decoding?

I have never really found the built in hierarchy tools especially useful on larger projects so a class viewer which provides more information over a basic class icon looks great

I totally get that and protobuf does seem like a smart alternative to "roll-your-own-funny-endian" LabVIEW string flattening and "loads of bytes over the wire" JSON

Looks cool and probably pretty useful - I was starting to wonder if you were going to bust out a full native LV gRPC implementation.

Did you have a use-case in mind? Not that you need to of course, I'm just curious.

Using quick drop and adding custom shortcuts up the wazoo helps but when I moved to doing LabVIEW full time, I changed to a drawing tablet to reduce wrist strain.

Some folks seem fine mousing for 8 hours straight, 5 days a week for years - I don't know how 🤷

I am currently wrestling with how to best distribute code in a nice modern way and absolutely feel this.

JKI are working on project dragon and there are other community efforts (www.vipm.io/package/feli...) but they still need some work from ni to get it over the line.

Using block-diagram clean-up more is helpful to encourage splitting code into smaller sub VIs that auto arrange better

Sometimes I would like to split code into a sub-VI but I have some non-typedef'd data type that I wouldn't want to pass into a subVI without it being a type-def but I really don't want to make it one.

I could make everything a .vim but then I would never get my code to compile

Depending on how complex your LV applications are, there isn't an obvious replacement.

Flojoy tried to position itself as an alternative but (last time I checked) it is a graphical-based means of combining python code chunks instead of a true data-flow driven language.

ni/emerson have brought perpetual licences back (although I am not sure of the cost).

Otherwise - some ni devices can be interfaced with via gRPC (mileage may vary) so accesible with many other languages or there is a python-daqmx option.

www.ni.com/en/shop/soft...

The LabVIEW Wiki has a list of community discords - the main LabVIEW discord (first link) is probably the best place to chat with fellow devs who can get you unstuck

labviewwiki.org/wiki/LabVIEW...

Sorry - I am not sure I can give you an easy fix here.

This kind of deeply nested code structure can get unwieldy - it might be worth checking out the state machine pattern
www.ni.com/en/support/d...

And maybe the slightly more advanced event driven state machine www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuIN...