NetworkTables needs to change.

[Thad House]

Originally Posted by Peter Johnson

Java and C++ will both use the new C++ implementation, but it's still up in the air whether LabView will use the C++ library or continue using a LabView-native implementation (with the same protocol improvements).

I would hope that LabVIEW chooses to go with the new library. Having only 1 version of the communication protocol makes debugging MUCH easier. It's also not that hard to port, and would probably only take a day or 2 if somebody works on it full time.

1 other great change this allows is adding new languages easily. Since all the comms code is in the native library, as long as your language can somehow interop into the C library, all you need is a very thin wrapper to gain full functionality. When I ported the old NetworkTables to C#, it was not easy, especially dealing with the endian issues. Porting the new library was much much easier, took less then a day, and you only had to write interop code and not communication code.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Thad House

I would hope that LabVIEW chooses to go with the new library. Having only 1 version of the communication protocol makes debugging MUCH easier. It's also not that hard to port, and would probably only take a day or 2 if somebody works on it full time.

1 other great change this allows is adding new languages easily. Since all the comms code is in the native library, as long as your language can somehow interop into the C library, all you need is a very thin wrapper to gain full functionality. When I ported the old NetworkTables to C#, it was not easy, especially dealing with the endian issues. Porting the new library was much much easier, took less then a day, and you only had to write interop code and not communication code.

I'm going to second this. We had a real headache with network tables this year. The driver station received data just fine, but trying to send data to the robot was hit-and-miss.