During today’s Season Celebration announcement of Peter Johnson for the Volunteer of the Year Award, Frank mentioned that 80% of the teams use WpiLib. What are the other 20% of teams using for their robots?
2 Likes
Primarily LabVIEW, but you can see the stats here: 2021 Beta Testing and 2020 Data Usage Reporting | FIRST
1 Like
A few, as seen in that link, run Python, and even fewer run Kotlin. Kotlin might be rolled into the 80% because it is interoperable with Java.
I mean there were at least two teams running Kotlin in North Carolina alone from 2019-2021
Both Python and Kotlin are counted in the 80% using WPILib: RobotPy is basically a Python wrapper around WPILibC (I might be wrong about this, feel free to correct me), and all the Kotlin teams I know (and I know quite a few) use WPILibJ.
I’m pretty sure that almost all of the 20% that don’t use WPILib are LabVIEW teams. If the low-level HAL C API counts as part of WPILib, it’s practically impossible to run anything else because that’s the only bridge (afaik) to languages that are not LabVIEW.
2 Likes
Reemphasizing this. I’m not aware of any language library that is not a wrapper or has a dependency on WPILib.
FIRST Rust Competition wraps WPILib and so does Emoji code lib.
1 Like
I know there’s at least one team that makes calls directly to the HAL based on this comment. One team won’t make a huge difference in a data set of a few thousand teams (assuming the 20% figure is based on 2019 numbers), but it’s an interesting technicality.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.