Comments on: External Code in LabVIEW, Part2: Comparison between shared libraries and CINs

By: Rolf Kalbermatter

Rolf Kalbermatter — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 05:38:02 +0000

Mikhail, I was going to say that to you
But being at NI Week I got a bit distracted

Greetings

By: Mikhail N Zakahrov

Mikhail N Zakahrov — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:13:46 +0000

I take my words back. You can abort Call Libary Nodes in Labview 8.2 and higher …

By: Mikhail N Zakahrov

Mikhail N Zakahrov — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:25:48 +0000

One thing not mentioned – CINs can be abortable in the correct fashion (i.e. proper deallocation and stuff) while dlls can not AFAIK. Mostly agree with everything else, though.

By: Tomi Maila

Tomi Maila — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 18:00:40 +0000

Rolf, thanks for this OO DLL related information. I was complitely unaware of this situation but it makes sense.

By: Rolf Kalbermatter

Rolf Kalbermatter — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:58:45 +0000

The reason why object oriented DLLs can’t be easily interfaced from a generic environment is that the object oriented interface is not binary compatible between most compilers. So this makes it very difficult to create an interface in LabVIEW that could connect to different OO DLLs. The only binary standard for OOL is Active X and now .Net and LabVIEW supports that fairly well although for obvious reasons only on Windows.

By: Tomi Maila

Tomi Maila — Tue, 22 May 2007 08:29:13 +0000

Nice article Rolf. I’ve always found CINs complicated to use and I’m happy to see that this legacy technology is being replaced by standard shared library calls. I never really understood why CINs should be preferred over shared libraries but the historical overview gave some perspective.

Although shared library support has developed a great deal during the last years, I think there is still a lot more to do to make it better. Especially the type support could be better. There should be more options to automatically convert between C types and LabVIEW types. I’d also like to be able to use typedefs to specify the types of the shared library call connector pane terminals. I think it’s a little weird that you actually cannot do this.

Another major disadvantage in the shared library support is the lack of support to object-oriented programming languages. After all most shared library interfaces are at present written with object-oriented programming language. The inability to directly use such DLLs without an external wrapper is a major disadvantage in LabVIEW.