NI LabWindows CVI from quantitative developer's perspective

Question

Would the built-in libraries of LabWindows CVI meet the needs of a quantitative developer?

Answer 1

My experience with LabWindows CVI is that its built-in libraries are more geared to instrumentation (GPIB, analog and digital I/O, motion control, and so forth) and data display (GUI widgets like meters, sliders, switches, LEDs, simple graphs), rather than extensive libraries of numeric, statistical, or analytic routines. The development environment that comes with Labwindows CVI is pretty decent -- they have a drag-and-drop GUI building interface that makes it easy to position controls within windows and wire them up to your C code, if that matters to you.

But for your analytic needs, you might be better served with a product like Matlab or IDL, especially if your work is heavy on the plotting/visualization end of things.

If you want to stick with C, the GNU Scientific Library has a pretty extensive set of statistical and analytic routines.

Answer 2

There are better environments and languages for analytics than Labwindows/CVI. I am not saying it is not possible though. NI has extensive support if you stay within their ecosystem. You can use LabView, Labwindos/CVI to program the data gathering part and then visualize/do post calculation it with e.g. NI DIAdem (basically a Excel on steroids).

You have integrated libraries for:

Signal Generation, Array Operations, Complex Operations, Signal Processing, Measuremtn, Statistic, Curve Fitting, Interpolation, Vector & matrix Algebra

A pretty decent list.

But still Labwindows/CVI is more targeted for a test environments where e.g temperature controller, measurement equipment needs to be controlled.

Languages like R, Matlab (as pointed out by Jim), Maple, Mathematica, or even the .net environment may be more helpful to your needs. If you are an inexperienced programmer or not fond of text based languages, check out LabView. Support & community is even bigger than it is for Labwindows/CVI.

Answer 3

I think LabWindows CVI has very nice built-in libraries, but a lot of annoying things, for example popups are not well designed, or multithreading is some kind of wired, and so on. Therefore you have to do a lot handmade, and search your way arround.
I switched over to use Visual Studio with C# and add the national references. National has a very good .net support. I could access my National Hardware almost as easy as from CVI, and can write my code in C# and profit from a well designed and very powerfull language. I think its a very nice Option.