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  1. CINs have nothing to do with LabWindows CVI, aside of the fact that there was a possibility to create them in LabWindows CVI. They were the way of embedding external code in a LabVIEW VI, before LabVIEW got the Call library Node. They were based on the idea of code resources that every program on a Macintosch consisted of before Apple moved to Mac OS X. Basically any file on a Mac consisted of a data fork that contained whatever the developer decided to be the data and a resource fork that was the model after which the LabVIEW resource format was modelled. For the most part the LabVIEW resource format is almost a verbatim copy of the old Macintosh resource format. A Macintosh executable usually consisted of an almost empty data fork and a resource fork where all the compiled executable code objects where just one of many Apple defined resource types together with icons, images, (localized) string tables and custom resource types that could be anything else a developer could dream up. Usually with the exception for very well known resource types these files also contained resource descriptions (a sort type descriptor like what LabVIEW uses for its type system) as an extra resource type for all its used resource types. The idea of CINs was interesting but cumbersome to maintain as you had to use the special lvsbutil executable to put the CIN code resource into the VI file. And in my opinion they stopped short of creating a good system by only allowing one CIN code resource per CIN name. If they had instead allowed for multiple CINs to exist for a specifc name, one for each supported platform (m68k, mppc, mx86, sparc, wx86, wx64, vxwk, arm, etc) one could have created a VI that truely runs on every possible platform by putting all the necessary code resources in there. As it was, if you put a Mac 68k code resource into the VI it would be broken on a Mac PPC or on Windows system and if you put a Windows code resource in it it would be broken on the Mac. Also once the Call Library Node supported most possible datatypes, CINs basically lost every appeal unless you wanted to hide the actual code resource by obfuscating it inside the VI itself. And that was hardly an interesting feature, but was bought with lots of trouble from having to create seperate C code resources for every single CIN (shared libraries can contain hundreds of functions all neatly combined in one file) and also a maintenance nightmare if you wanted to support multiple platforms. As to the articles mentioned in the link from dadreamer, I resurrected them from the wayback engine a few years ago and you can find them on https://blog.kalbermatter.nl
    2 points
  2. You might try loading macOS LV version into debugger, because it has more debug symbols unstripped unlike Windows and Linux versions. As I recall I was able to read out the rest of the parameters and their types just by browsing the code in IDA. It's mostly about old LV versions before LV 2009. Check LVSB and PLAT resource sections (and maybe LIsb for external subroutines), if you're going to study how CINs work. There are Rolf's articles also, that could help you to put all the pieces together: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/What-happened-to-CINs-And-how-else-can-another-language-work/m-p/2726539#M807177
    1 point
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