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My first thought would be why even think about building your own solution if you haven't explored the existing alternatives. I only did some minor tests with Francois' API but the client seemed to work well in both Windows and Linux so if you built your own API and posted it to LAVA the first question I would probably ask is why I would want to choose your API over the one I already was using. I think you have to spend some time evaluating existing APIs so you can have a set of reasons as to why you're building yet another API. Even if you have reasons for not liking an existing API it might still be a good use of time to see if you can address those issues by working from the existing API. As an example, if you find that the performance isn't good enough in pure LabVIEW you might not need to start from scratch. If you can get a big performance boost by replacing a few key internal VIs with DLL calls maybe you can bring that to the owner of the existing API and see if that's a change they would make. If they're unwilling to make those changes (maybe they find value in keeping everything in pure LabVIEW) then you can start working on your own API with very clear reasons as to why someone would even want to use it.

Basically the same as Jacobson said. The DMA FIFOs internally are 64-bit aligned. If you try to push data through it that doesn't fit into the 64 bits (8 * 8 bit, 4 * 16 bit, 2 * 32 bit or 1 * 64 bit) then the FPGA will actually force alignment by stuffing extra filler bytes into the DMA channel. In that case you would loose some of the throughput as there is extra data transferred that simply is discarded on the other side. That loss is however typically very low. The worst case would be if you try to push 5 byte data elements (clusters of 5 bytes for instance) through the channel. Then you would waste 3/8 of the DMA bandwidth. The performance on the FPGA side should not change at all purely from different data sizes. What could somewhat change is the usage of FPGA resources as binary bit data is stuffed, shifted, packed/unpacked and otherwise manipulated to push into or pull from the DMA interface logic. The performance on the realtime side could change however as more complex packing/unpacking will incur some extra CPU consumption.

They are trying their best to snap NI at a bargain price, knowing full well that the picture will completely change when LabVIEW 2023 Q4 will be released, instantly doubling the value of NI share price.