Rolf Kalbermatter

As you can see in the discussion thread for this download, the author didn't get to implement the ooCalc much and seems not to have found time to work on that further.

AFAIK VIPM pulls the actual packages from the sourceforge servers (and the NI Tools Network server). So besides moving all the content to another site you would either have to leave the build packages on sourceforge or find a way to easily let VIPM reference this new server instead. Am not even sure how binary packages on github work and if they are easily referenced by external package managers like VIPM. I think there doesn't exist a authoritative list like that. It would be possible to create a fairly accurate list with some effort albeit there is no warranty that it would be complete, but so far people only have asked for this. Nobody ever went to the effort to actually start to create something like this. Even if you had that list several people on it have moved on and are not actively involved in LabVIEW work anymore and may not even follow this microuniverse anymore.

Actually there is one point which comes to mind. VIPM including the latest version does pull all the OpenG libraries from Sourceforge. Moving that to another server would render all existing VIPM installations non functional for downloading OpenG libraries. I'm sure there is a way to change a configuration file or something in VIPM that could let it use another server and the Pro version supports arbitrary server locations but that may all have its own trouble and complications.

The merging capability isn't exactly working well, definitely not something to use in automated merging during GIT pull requests. As to that the development of LabVIEW seems to have stagnated I can't deny that. There have been two quite large architectural changes in the last 7 to 8 years. One is the support for 64 bit targets which got substantiated in version 2009 and finished with the 64 bit versions for Linux and Mac in version 2014. Especially the Mac version must have been a major work as more or less everything had to be changed from the Carbon framework to the Cocoa framework. That is a major change in the code base, most likely with the addition of Objective C code specifically for this move (many Cocoa APIs are not really accessible from C or C++ code). The other big change was the introduction of the LLVM compiler backend around 2011. As it is something that works in the background, not much should have been felt from it for the end user. Technologically however it is a major change to the code base. The fact that it has been so largely invisible to the users is in fact a big achievement, as it has huge chances to break lots of things in many places. So it's not like there hasn't been much development going on in LabVIEW, but a lot of the last big changes are almost invisible to the end user. There has been for several years a lot of work going on to modernize LabVIEW. Quite some of it was in the underlying infrastructure such as multiplatform support (not just multi-CPU and -OS as originally developed), LLVM compiler backend and many more things. The UI side of LabVIEW is however burdened with lots of legacy liabilities that can't easily be changed without breaking lots of things and user expectations. Keep an eye out for new developments there. It won't be as invisible as the other changes mentioned and not everybody is going to like them . Breaking old habits is one of the most difficult things to do.

I'm not sure that is desirable! Bigger companies have failed very badly to provide a working source code control system (anyone ever tried to use Visual Source Safe?), so I don't have high hopes that an SCC offering from NI would be better than what we can get now with openly availabe Open Source tools. That smoother and more effective merge tools for LabVIEW would be a good thing is unquestionable. But the task of comparing vectors and directed graphs with each other is a magnitude or two more complex than simple text code comparison and to automate that would seem a really complicated task that whole generations of computer science programmers could spend years on. Given the closed source nature of LabVIEW that is however not going to happen.

Shaun wasn't talking about zipping up code for source code control purposes. Just that the additional benefits of GIT compared to SVN, which is currently used for OpenG, basically diminish to nothing, since merging is a highly manual process. Seeing so many GIT clones abandoned quickly on "normal" languages, where automatic merging is at least a possibility albeit even there never without thorough manual review of any merge, the collaborative advantages of GIT simply get lost when it comes to LabVIEW code. SVN works for that just as good if not better thanks to very intuitive and easy to use clients like TortoiseSVN. Yes there is a TortoiseGIT client too, and I tried it but it does show regularly the unix origins even when using it as Windows shell extension. Not the type of seamless integration that makes these things easy to use for people who want to program rather than read manuals. Sourceforge having issues is undeniable and that might be indeed a reason to consider to change the provider for the source code control repository for OpenG, but GIT has definitely not any serious advantage in comparison to using SVN when it comes to LabVIEW code. Also I really doubt there will be suddenly any inrush of new people reviving the OpenG initiative because of such a change. LabVIEW is a nish product, used mostly in industry applications, and most users have paid jobs that makes collaborating on OpenG like initiatives kind of hard. And the others have moved on to Python and the like since. The popularity of LabVIEW won't change because of moving OpenG to things like Github. The popularity of LabVIEW is at the point of what it is, because of decisions made by NI about how to market this language. They are or have been fairly agressive about getting it into educational institutions to get future engineers acquainted with it before they move into the industry, but they were and are very reluctant to loosen the control on LabVIEW in any way. As such it has been and still is a proprietary and a single source application development program, rather than a general purpose programming language, despite the fact that it is technically a fully functional programming language. From a commercial point of view history has shown that their decision was in fact a very successful and profitable one. For the academical purpose of graphical programming languages it was less favorable, but you can't fault a stock market traded company for choosing the profitable approach.

Well I see a GZipStream in there, but not knowing the actual language you use it is hard to judge what specifics that may imply. Are you sure you did proper preparation of the byte stream, namely first removing the "Zipped:" string from the stream and then doing the correct Base64 decoding before trying to pass the resulting byte stream to the GZIP function?

Well I'm sure the GIT system was exactly developed for what you see as original idea. And it works amazingly well for certain projects with a central maintenance like the Linux kernel or the Wine project. However lacking such centralized maintenance it tends to get the cloning mess you allude to. Because most developers are just wanting to get this new awesome feature into the software and not worry about integrating it in the main branch. I still follow the Wine project a bit and it is the single most problem there, some contributor has a great new idea and drops a patch, but then when faced with the trouble of integrating it into the whole and complying with common styles, formatting and following proper error handling and making sure the modified code passes all unit test, the majority just starts to complain about the stringent rules and eventually abandons it. Even in text programming, merging a software branch back into the trunk is often a very tedious, and work intense process, that even advanced code merging algorithms never will be able to fully automate, since it is not always enough to just look at the factual differences in code, but the whole context often has an influence too. And with even basic automatic LabVIEW code merging being still a pipe dream, this makes the distributed development model of GIT more of a liability to LabVIEW source code control rather than an advantage.

Please provide some sample data and VIs. As you refer to the GZIP VIs on the NI thread you need to make sure you have a proper GZIP stream you want to deflate. If you rather have a ZIP file stream you will need the ZIP functions in the ZLIB library instead. The Inflate algorithm simply assumes that the incoming data stream is a properly compressed (deflate) stream and if it is something else it certainly can get upset and cause all kinds of possible problems.

I can only speak for myself, but I do find the GIT workflow not really very easy. I'm sure there are some tools nowadays that make it quite a bit easier to use, but the impressions I got when comparing SVN to GIT several years ago, was that SVN was simply there to use while with GIT you had to learn a whole bunch of magic incantations and remember arcane commands and specific sequences or you ended up with a bigger mess in your project than when using the simple old ZIP-it-all-up source code control system. That all said, if there are people who really want to use GIT and are eager to revive the OpenG initiative if it is moved to a GIT based site, they shouldn't be blocked from it. I don't have much to say about that as my current submission rate to OpenG is just very slightly above 0 and hardly can drop much even if I should decide to not like the new workflow.

There is a small chance that the software originated from the original developer or copyright holder who of course would have the right to relicense his or her work in any way he or she likes. I definitely have used VIs in some of my projects which I have also submitted to OpenG at some point and they don't carry the OpenG license text as that was often added after the initial submission to OpenG. Will be interesting to hear the outcome of this.

Sorry, for answering so late. I was with vacation for the last two weeks. You got a few details not exactly right. 1) LuaVIEW 1.x onl;y supports LabVIEW for Windows 32 bit, LabVIEW for Mac PPC (can be considered obsolete by now as the last OSX version that supported that was around 10.5 Leopard), and LabVIEW for Linux 32 bit. 2) Yes Lua for LabVIEW is copyrighted and we have not given anyone else the right to distribute it on their own. 3) Not sure how VIPM could automatically show it, but you probably mean that you downloaded the 2.0 VIPM package from http://ww.luaforlabview.com and tried to install it through VIPM. The current package tells VIPM specifically to only support the Windows platform since it lacks the shared libraries for the other platforms entirely and wouldn't be able to run there. 4) Lua for LabVIEW 2.0 does currently support LabVIEW 32 bit and LabVIEW 64 bit for Windows. Support for LabVIEW for Mac for OSX 10.8 and higher for 32 bit and 64 bit is under testing and should be released soon. Same for support for LabVIEW for Linux 32 bit and 64 bit. Also support for the NI realtime targets will be added in that release too. Lua for LabVIEW 2.0 supports LabVIEW versions from 7.1 onwards but this is likely to be changed to a higher version in the next major release; most likely 8.5 or possibly even 2009. Since Lua for LabVIEW 2.0 makes use of Lua 5.1 as engine, there were a few minor changes in the Lua syntax itself that could make modifications to Lua scripts necessary. However in the whole unit test suite that comes with Lua for LabVIEW there were only two incidents like that and they were related to the changed long string syntax. Lua for LabVIEW is compiled with the option to still allow the old long string format without equal signs between the brackets for single level long strings but when embedding long strings inside long strings, Lua 5.1 does explicitly disallow using the old syntax. If you have any other questions please don't hesitate to contact me directly here or under info@luaforlabview.com

When you execute a Open VI reference node you ALWAYS receive a new and unique VI reference. This VI reference manages the data space, calling mechanism and also flags like how the VI can be invoked (asynchronous, clone, type of clone, etc, etc). As such it is indeed a completely independent instance of the VI from your original static VI reference. Basically the behavior you expect about VI references used to be true in a far ago past when LabVIEW did not support reentrancy, clones and asynchronous call, but it has changed dramatically under the hood with the introduction of these features. You usually don't feel much about those fundamental changes under the hood, but can run into it in such situations where the current behavior can sometimes surprise you. And there is something else to this. The datatype input to the Open VI Reference node is only there to define the type of the outgoing strict VI reference. The actual VI to instantiate is defined by the VI Path or VI Name input. The VI Open Reference function will then inspect the VI connector pane to match the datatype input and throw an error if they don't match. But nothing of the refnum instance passed to the datatype input is used, except the connector pane info. Not even the name or path as you would otherwise not have to provide that for a static VI reference.

The first LabVIEW to have a native 64 bit version was LabVIEW 2009 for Windows. So this software definitely never was tested with that and the DLL is most likely only a 32 bit DLL too. That all said the OP has provided very little information to allow anyone to say what the real problem may be. From the description it would seem that it is not a 64 bit version. 64 Bit Windows XP was never really used outside of specific use cases as there were indeed many problems with it. So it would seem unlikely that he is using such a system and even more unlikely that he decided to install LabVIEW 64 bit on it. Also if it was a bitness incompatibility the VI would be simply broken and couldn't be run, but what he describes is that the VI returns some number rather than 1 as he expects. So the DLL can be loaded and executed by LabVIEW. As to IOS going 64 bit, that is not exactly the same. You can't really install arbitrary applications on an IOS device. It's either from the Apple App Store or nowhere at all! The App Store will only provide you with apps that are known to be compatible with your particular device. If you want to do your own thing you are all on your own and actually have to jailbreak the device; whoever does that is not going to be bothered by strange errors and incompatibilities! He rather sees them as a welcome challenge to get it working anyhow.

Actually that setting is inherently used by the application builder. Whatever you define as top level VI in there gets intrinsically set this flag and will cause the VI to launch your application.

Auto handle menus at launch: never used that and not sure exactly what it does Run when opened: When the front panel is opened the VI is automatically started. "Show front panel when called": When the VI is called as subVI, this will open the front panel automatically "Show front panel when loaded" . When the VI is loaded into memory, this will open the front panel automatically. so basically they are all related in some ways but do different things at different moments.

I have my own error handler loop in every app. This loop polls a queue for new error messages, displays them in an automatic scrolling string control (that in some applications is optional), logs the error to a log file (and at the same tome looks for really old log files that can be deleted) and also optionally shows a floating but non modal dialog. I have an Error Handler VI which looks just like the standard Error Handler and which does all the things about optional filtering of the errors, looking up appropriate error messages, before sending the error to the queue and also by default clearing the error from the error out cluster. Works pretty neat, quite scalable and has provided me many times with helpful log files about what errors the customer encountered.

I'm sorry to inform you that the library as posted in the first post has several issues in the compiled DLL. Some are caused by newer LabVIEW versions, some by newer Windows systems and some are simply bugs that initially didn't cause issues for some reason. I'm at the moment busy with other work and can't immediately make this work. I do plan to revise the library to work on newer systems and fix some of the bugs but since this is a hobby project that I do in my spare time, this will not be a high priority.

You made a copy paste error with your rinocloud link!

I'm excited to announce that Lua for LabVIEW 2.0 for Windows has been released. Please go to http://www.luaforlabview.com to find out more about this. This release supports the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of LabVIEW for Windows. Support for other platforms including NI relatime targets will follow shortly.

Someone certainly has a very unrealistic view about me here! Your problem are most likely the embedded pointers inside the structure pUiInfo, While it's possible in LabVIEW to allocate memory buffers and assign the resulting pointer to the entry in the cluster it is a big hassle. Also the structure needs to be different for 32 bit and 64 bit LabVIEW since pointers and Handles in Windows are of the size of the system too. An extra problem might be that on the MSDN page there is a user comment that claims that the ANSI version of this function is not working properly. Since LabVIEW uses ANSI strings everywhere this would require your strings to be translated to widechar UTF16 and then to call the W function. All in all it is a lot more work than 30 seconds for sure. And I'm not even sure it is so much safer. The Windows dialog uses Windows controls and they can be targeted from a different process with enough privilege escalation. The LabVIEW controls on the other hand are a lot harder to target from outside the LabVIEW process since they are fully implemented in LabVIEW itself. It would actually help to see what you have done so far. If it is something minor I'm certainly willing to point you into the right direction but I have no inclination at all to build this from scratch.

I think copying a higher version vi.lib to a lower version device driver installation is almost certainly asking for trouble. While the newer version may use new APIs for enhanced operations, the lower version system driver would not support that. That can cause immediate trouble when loading the VIs as they might attempt to link to non-existing APIs in the old driver, or it may be only later at runtime apparent when certain low level device driver methods are invoked with new extended parameters that it does not support. So personally if you want to do such an installation chances are bigger that it will work if you install the highest level driver package with support for as many LabVIEW versions as possible and leave the vi.lib on the older LabVIEW versions with the highest supported driver version. In your example this would most likely mean to install DAQmx 14.0 etc. on the computer to get it install the daqmx and other drivers into the LabVIEW 2011 installation, then rename the LabVIEW 2011 folder temporarily to something else, so that the DAQmx 15.0 installer won't see it anymore and won't remove the DAQmx support from it. This leaves a pretty big change that it will still work after renaming the LabVIEW 2011 folder back after the new drivers have been installed. But as explained earlier I would not recommend that solution for a production quality build system at all as you may end up with obscure errors that are very hard to debug and a bug report to NI won't help much as you work with an unsupported installation.

Theoretically, the shared resources would be upwards compatible such that the 2011 VIs "should" be able to work with the 2015 binary resources (shared system libraries and device drivers). Practically anyone who has written such drivers knows that this is VERY difficult to do and absolutely impossible to guarantee without explicitedly testing it all in every detail. Now take into account that many of the NI drivers are for multiple platforms (Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, Mac OS X 32-bit and 64-bit, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit, Pharlap ETS, VxWorks, NI Realtime Linux) and NI does provide usually backwards compatibility for the last 3 LabVIEW versions and you see quickly that adding even one more version to this is definitely going to have a huge extra impact in testing. And everytime there is an incompatibility on any of those combinations someone has to go in and make a fix and then testing again all around. If you don't limit the scope there somehow you end up testing, fixing and testing again for unlimited amount of times and no product is released anymore. I have tried such installations in the past but not for production type development. It was mostly to be able to look at older source code without having to load it into a newer LabVIEW version. Never really executed anything substantial on real hardware. The recommendation about using Virtual Machines is actually the most sensible in this case, aside from having dedicated hardware for each version.

Does anyone know who maintains the labviewwiki.org site and if the service is temporarly down or should be considered discontinued?

They work fine if you use them without authentication or from LabVIEW to LabVIEW. Otherwise you run into trouble since NI has so far refused to document their NIAuth mechanisme used in them!