Quote:
Originally Posted by bobbysq
I really hope this means they won't lock down WPILib, preventing cool mods like running code at 50hz or using DIO as extra PWM output.
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Our motivation for pulling out the third party libraries was our inability to adequately test all hardware devices that came along, decoupling our release/update schedule from (possibly) many vendors, and providing a clean way for other third party code like teams' open source software to be easily included by other teams.
We feel our software and development tools should be as open as possible. We acknowledge there could be quality assurance issues with letting third party vendors handle packaging, such as badly written software, missing languages, and restrictive licenses. We're working on packaging standards and an easy packaging process for our supported target platforms. For example, we could have a Gradle script that builds for all our platforms and produces a tarball containing shared objects and includes. That would get automatically detected by the WPILib Eclipse plugins and extracted (I can't speak about LabVIEW since I've never used it). Part of that process could include us providing build and distribution infrastructure (not that it would be required) while vendors provide tested code that meets our packaging standards. Keep in mind we're still actively working on what this will look like.
I know a few other developers and I are willing to help vendors bring their language support up to speed if their licenses aren't restrictive (virtuald has echoed this sentiment a few times).