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Great news! Thanks for all the hard work. LUA on the cRIO? Interesting possibilities...

Hello to everybody being interested in LuaVIEW. I’m in the final stages of testing and finalizing a package for the Beta of LuaVIEW 2.0B1. This new release has a number of changes to the previous release but efforts have been made to keep it as compatible as possible to the last LuaVIEW release. Following characteristics are valid for this release: LabVIEW 7.1 or newer Uses Lua 5.1.5 as Lua engine (LuaVIEW 1.2 used Lua 5.0.3) The core library has been changed into a DLL/shared library Supports LabVIEW for Linux x86, Windows x86 and x64 Distributed as OpenG package, can be installed with the OpenG package installer or with VIPM This Beta is time limited and will stop working after the end of 2012. If no serious problems are found during the Beta test, the 2.0 release version is expected to be released around end of August. The release version will include runtime support for LabVIEW for Mac OS X and NI realtime systems (cRIO and Pharlap ETS). It will also include a binary module to access NI-VISA directly from within a Lua script for at least Windows. To receive a download link to the Beta package please send me a pm and specify which LabVIEW version and OS you plan to use with this Beta. Sincerely

Let me comment on some of these things Full disclosure: I'm currently maintaining LuaVIEW and I'm the lone LabPython programmer, who did this in the first place to find out how the script node could be used by someone outside of NI. And once I had that, I realized that wrapping those functions into VIs would allow real dynamic access to the Python engine. At about the same time my collegue started to develop LuaVIEW for a rather large customer project. We had quite some fun arguing over if Lua or Python was the better language. While that view is a personal taste it is clear that Lua is a very much self contained and extremely compact scripting environment that is much easier to embed in other systems like LabVIEW. In fact Python, at that time at least, had no real intentions to actively support embedding of its engine into other environments. The API was there and it could be done, but the Python developer community was in general unresponsive to any suggestions of improvements in that part. Unlike LabPython LuaVIEW does NOT have a script node interface but only a VI interface that not only allows but in fact requires to pass a script at runtime. While LuaVIEW doesn't do that out of the box currently it would be not a to complicated project to develop that. But I'm not convinced about the need for that. Aside that LuaVIEW is free for non commercial use, the initial purchase costs are usually the smallest parts of a projects cost. Any decent software programmer will incur the license costs of a commercial LuaVIEW license in two days of programming an alternative solution. Two days is very little time for such a thing as a scripting engine.