Which version to install - LabVIEW 32-bit or 64-bit

[Gurdas]

I would like to hear (again) from the community on this topic since it's been over 3 years since the original post. I just purchased a new development machine with 16GB RAM (Windows 10 64-bit). Customer end machines will be mostly, or if needed entirely, Windows 10 64-bit but maybe with 8 GB RAM. I am not sure if Windows 10 even comes in 32-bit, since every computer I've seen with Windows 10 is 64-bit but that's just a curiosity thought, since we prefer our customer machines also be 64-bit. Because there are situations when we are handling large files, more than 4GB in size, maybe even 8 GB in near-future.

Further, MS released Office 2019 a month ago and for the first time, their recommendation is to install 64-bit version of Office. All my non-NI add-ons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint work with 64-bit Office.

But....some parts of the LabVIEW ecosystem are still stuck in 32-bit world.

Report Generation Toolkit (32-bit or 64-bit) is still demanding Office to be 32-bit. Is that really true, even in 2018?
http://www.ni.com/product-documentation/54029/en/
http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/375405d.html

And the Database Connectivity Toolkit will not even work with 64-bit LabVIEW?

http://www.ni.com/product-documentation/52818/en/

Or, maybe these pages are not updated and the NI world has caught up with 64-bit. Feels like NI/LabVIEW is forcing me to compromise ...

[RavensFan]

I'd still recommend 32 bit LabVIEW.

I hadn't heard anything about Office 2019.  Even if it is out, and just came out, it is going to take a little bit of time before NI can update the Report Generation Toolkit to support it.  I'd expect that to occur with LabVIEW 2019.

[Gurdas]

@RavensFan, thanks.

I mention Office 2019 merely because MS is now recommending it's 64-bit flavor.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/09/24/office-2019-is-now-available-for-windo...

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-will-finally-offer-64-bit-office-by-default-moving-forward/

Otherwise, Office has been around in 64-bit since Office 2010. That makes me wonder why isn't the Report Generation Toolkit ALREADY compatible with 64-bit Office (8+ years should be enough time). Hope someone from NI can explain why and if we will see this issue resolved soon. I really want to move everything to 64-bit, we are starting to handle some really big files where the ability to address more memory is desirable.

Also want to hear from NI why the Database Connectivity Toolkit (and few other toolkits) won't work with 64-bit LabVIEW.

All said and done, LabVIEW is going to become my one and only reason to install 32-bit Office, when I have a strong preference and arguably even a need to go 64-bit. That's not a good sign for a programming environment.

[comrade]

First, I have been wondering about the poor 64Bit-support by NI as well.
That being said, as I already stated in my first post in this thread, communication between 32- and 64Bit versions via VI server can solve the problem with missing 64Bit toolkits. Of course there will be a lot more sw design to do, but it works rather straight forward.

As a second note, I would advise you to increase the RAM in your systems far beyond 16GB, if you plan on processing datasets of 4GB or more. You will most certainly run into the situation where you must keep several copies of the dataset within the machine’s memory. The OS and other non-related processes will take up their share of the RAM as well. So in case you don‘t plan on reading the dataset chunkwise there won‘t be much of a choice but to up your machine‘s RAM.

[KarlosAmigos]

Continuing this discussion from 2015... It's 2023 now and the world has increasingly moved to 64 bitness. On the LabVIEW install advice pages though, the rule of thumb still seems to be to stick with 32 bit, which is what I have stuck with up until now. Previous comments from 2018 expressed surprise at the persistence of 32 bit, yet here we are 5 years later...

My next big project will involve a lot of IMAQdx, video processing and saving of images using a high resolution machine vision camera (FLIR Oryx) I have built a very high end PC just for this, also using 10G Ethernet to handle the throughput from the camera. As far as I can tell, all the toolkits I need and so on are available in 64 bit so, I'm going to take the plunge!

[crossrulz]

NI has flat out stated to the LabVIEW Champions that they want to start pushing everybody to 64-bit (deprecate 32-bit in order to greatly simplify the codebase).  I plan on moving to 64-bit when my current project is over since cRIO support is finally available in 2022 Q3 64-bit.  I'm currently using 2019SP1 32-bit.

[Bob_Schor]

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@Gurdas wrote:

@RavensFan, thanks.

I mention Office 2019 merely because MS is now recommending it's 64-bit flavor.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/09/24/office-2019-is-now-available-for-windo...

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-will-finally-offer-64-bit-office-by-default-moving-forward/

Otherwise, Office has been around in 64-bit since Office 2010. That makes me wonder why isn't the Generation Toolkit ALREADY compatible with 64-bit Office (8+ years should be enough time). Hope someone from NI can explain why and if we will see this issue resolved soon. I really want to move everything to 64-bit, we are starting to handle some really big files where the ability to address more memory is desirable.

Also want to hear from NI why the Database Connectivity Toolkit (and few other toolkits) won't work with 64-bit LabVIEW.

All said and done, LabVIEW is going to become my one and only reason to install 32-bit Office, when I have a strong preference and arguably even a need to go 64-bit. That's not a good sign for a programming environment.

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I'm reasonably certain that I was running 64-bit Office in 2016, and had no problems with the Report Generation Toolkit, reading and writing Excel Workbooks without problems.  I've got another "corporate" Laptop now, am running LabVIEW 2019, and also have no problems with Office.  But I checked, and found that the Office 365 they installed on my machine was 32-bit Office!  Why?

So I'm now running on my one-year-old personal Laptop, running Office 2021 64-bit, and LabVIEW 2019 (to be compatible with my group at work).  Works like a charm, saves Excel like a Champ.  64-bit Windows 10, 32-bit LabVIEW 2019 SP1, 64-bit Office 2021, Excel.

Bob Schor

[santo_13]

I have been completely using LabVIEW 64-bit since 2016 and now on 2021.

[rolfk]

As crossrulz stated, NI has moved to full 64-bit operation for all the Toolkits and drivers they still actively support as of 2022Q4. There still may be a glitch or two somewhere when using 64-bit LabVIEW but generally speaking the expected support for 64-bit is at the tipping point. From now on new development will be in 64-bit and bug fixes may or may not be incorporated in the 32-bit versions. I would expect that LabVIEW 2024 or 2025 will be definitely 64-bit only as has been the case for LabVIEW for Mac and LabVIEW for Linux since 2017!

The only reason to still use 32-bit LabVIEW from now on would be if you use third party hardware or libraries that come only with 32-bit support, or old NI hardware that is not actively supported anymore by the latest drivers. But then you wouldn't use the latest LabVIEW version either.

[Bob_Schor]

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@rolfk wrote:

As crossrulz stated, NI has moved to full 64-bit operation for all the Toolkits and drivers they still actively support as of 2022Q4. There still may be a glitch or two somewhere when using 64-bit LabVIEW but generally speaking the expected support for 64-bit is at the tipping point. From now on new development will be in 64-bit and bug fixes may or may not be incorporated in the 32-bit versions. I would expect that LabVIEW 2024 or 2025 will be definitely 64-bit only as has been the case for LabVIEW for Mac and LabVIEW for Linux since 2017!

The only reason to still use 32-bit LabVIEW from now on would be if you use third party hardware or libraries that come only with 32-bit support, or old NI hardware that is not actively supported anymore by the latest drivers. But then you wouldn't use the latest LabVIEW version either.

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Wearing my "Academic" Hat, I wonder where this leaves the Academic Hardware, most importantly (from where I sit) the myRIO.  It has been tough since LabVIEW 2019 to get the myRIO Software Toolkit to work with LabVIEW 32-bit (LabVIEW 2019 was straight-forward, LabVIEW 2020 didn't have a LabVIEW 2020 myRIO Toolkit, and didn't support the LabVIEW for myRIO Environment, and the Toolkit for LabVIEW 2021 wasn't released until LabVIEW 2022 Q3 was released (and then proved extremely "tricky" to install).  I have no idea (because I haven't had the spare time to try it) if LabVIEW 2022 supports the myRIO Environment ...

Bob Schor