What happened to CINs? And how else can another language work with LabVIEW?

reydelsol · ‎01-31-2014

The vast majority of software developers are not graphical programmers. I have been using LabVIEW for a long time, and am looking for better ways to integrate LabVIEW with software developed in other languages; and across operating systems. For now, let's just talk C.

I'm well aware of LabVIEW's ability to integrate shared libraries:

http://digital.ni.com/manuals.nsf/websearch/8D930295FFBF9F7686256D2C00624728

But I wonder what happened to CINs?

Did they get dropped from support with LabVIEW 2009? Or are they still kicking around somewhere?

Dennis_Knutson · ‎01-31-2014

They got dropped. There were only a few advantages to using a cin and creating a DLL is generally simpler and easier to support. You've got support for c type DLLs, ActiveX, and .NET so what other language do you want support for that a cin is required?

rolfk · ‎02-03-2014

As Dennis says, they are more or less dropped. All current 32 bit LabVIEW desktop versions are still able to load CINs that were created in the according desktop variant of an earlier version of LabVIEW but the tools to create them have basically been removed from the latest LabVIEW versions. The reasons are manyfold and I wrote a lengthy series of blogs many years ago about the demise of CINs and why that wasn't really a bad thing.

Seems they have vanished in the depths of the internet somehow. I'll see if I can resurrect them and put them on lavag.org.

LabVIEW for Windows 64 Bit and any new platform of LabVIEW will not support CINs anymore as each new platform also needs a complete review and modification of the according CINs toolchain and NI decided that it was time to spend that effort for more fruitful exercises.

In terms of support of extra languages you loose absolutely nothing. CINs had to be written in C, anything else was unsupported and even while theoretically possible a total pain in the a$$ to do. Shared libraries you can create in many more languages!

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog

dadreamer · ‎02-03-2014

rolfk wrote:

Seems they have vanished in the depths of the internet somehow.

I've uploaded cintools from older LabVIEW on these russian boards:

http://www.labviewportal.eu/viewtopic.php?p=47168#p47168

Here are also some instructions for adjusting Microsoft Visual Studio project to compile lsb files if any one understands russian, or course

rolfk · ‎02-03-2014

I didn't mean the cintools. Maintaining cins is a dead end if you ever intend to support modern LabVIEW platforms (64 bit Windows, all the LabVIEW RT targets including Linux RT and most likely even Intel Macs).

I was refereing to 3 blog articles I wrote some years ago on Expression Flow blog from Tomi Maila, that explained the history of CINs and why they were really obsolete by then already. That has been about 4 to 5 years ago. They have been getting even more obsolete by now!