Compact rio not being able to use C

[Greg McKaskle]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

There's nothing wrong with the CINs being ancient. They still work...and allow you to access compiled C and C++ code. I haven't used a Call Library Node. Most of the code I use at work was already written for use with CINs.

Correct. There isn't anything wrong with being ancient, but being ancient is one of the reasons they aren't supported on new platforms. To give a bit of history, CINs were invented when LV was still on the Mac, and there wasn't a good choice for dynamically called binary code -- no DLL-like entity. Since they were being constructed, a number of other bells and whistles were added to them.

Around six years later, when CodeFragments on Mac, and DLLs on Windows existed, the CallLibrary node was added. In some ways it is superior to CINs, in other ways, it was a bit lacking since it was defined industry-wide, and not inside the LV team. In the fifteen years or so that have passed since then, both have been maintained and reworked. In the next release, NI will no longer ship any VIs containing CINs. Over the year, as code is touched for some other reason, it has been moved to CallLib nodes, but we still support them because customers have written them, and don't necessarily want to spend the time taking their C code to a new library format. If it works, why change it.

On the other hand, new platforms, like cRIO can't use existing CINs. They require the C code to be recompiled for a new OS anyway. This will require reworking the make file, the header includes, dealing with little nit picky C stuff that was marginally compatible. So while doing that, we think it is better to move from CIN libs to .outs, .DLLs, .frameworks, .libs, or whatever the platform preference is for shared binary code.

And that is the state the cRIO is in. It supports external binary code written by you, by the OS vendor, by third parties, etc. It does so in a standard way rather than the twenty-x year old proprietary way that LV invented.

That was why I called them ancient, and that is why the cRIO doesn't support CINs. Ancient doesn't necessarily mean bad, but ancient things do fall out of use, otherwise I'd be tapping this out in morse code or writing it in Latin.

Greg McKaskle