Leaderboard

What ensegre is getting at is that LabVIEW has never (officially) supported unicode and at one point NI said they don't need to (in classic) because NXG supports it. There are some UTF8 primitives that means you can support UTF8 internally but many of the controls and primitives don't support it (like the file control and functions). For that you have to have replacement windows file functions but that will not help you loading projects and is not cross-platform.

It has that feel to it but it is far more powerful. CodeTyphon is really a fork of Lazarus but with all components already packaged. That makes it a bit daunting to begin with as there are multiple components to choose from that are very similar - but not quite - since they are from different tool-sets to do the same things. Just get it installed and have a look through the (hundreds?) of examples (Under Tools>>CodeOcean Examples). The big boon of it though is that the IDE runs on most Desktops and from there it can compile native code for hundreds of targets. At that point you are way down the rabbit hole from the forms editor, though. Another plus is that it can use Lazarus and Delphi components. So if you have 3 different sources of projects and components you can leverage.

As Francois noted, no, you cannot prevent it. The default instances are useful in many sentinel and error handling situations -- think like NaN in floating point. The defaults can also serve a role similar to "null" but without all the dangers of open references. Details about design decisions of interfaces can be found here.

The restriction on DVRs is the same for interfaces as for classes: it allows for constructor/destructor notation for by-reference entities. Please don't go hyper excited and think "Oh, this is the tool I should have been using all along." By-reference designs are fragile and prone to several classes of errors that by-value code cannot create. Stick to the wires where possible; use references only when nothing else serves! 🙂 Details here.