LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
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LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#2Ouch.
For reference, LabVIEW is used by many types of engineers, especially industrial process engineers to develop custom control systems, say controlling the automation of steelworks. It involves visual programming and process engineering. This will hurt industry because it regresses development and production environments onto a monoculture of Windows with some Linux. A problem of supporting and using non-Windows platforms is that many custom tools, drivers, and interfacing environments only support Windows.
As another point, securing industrial systems is critical, so production systems running LabVIEW should be locked down using extreme measures because of the potential harm of compromise. Remember Stuxnet. (Which would make a neat Hollywood movie.)
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#3I've seen lots of shops running labview, but never on a Mac. I doubt NI's losing many customers with this move.
Maybe with a focus on Windows they can finally implement zooming in and out of VIs. It's like a text editor that doesn't let you change the font size. Probably in the pocket of Big Monitor.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#4Ouch. For reference, LabVIEW is used by many types of engineers, especially industrial process engineers to develop custom control systems, say controlling the automation of steelworks. It involves visual programming and process engineering. This will hurt industry because it regresses development and production environments onto a monoculture of Windows with some Linux. A problem of supporting and using non-Windows…
Most things running labview for critical applications like you mention use labvew to write the program and then send the program to a embedded target device that actually runs it.
Rarely anymore do we have a PC with a bunch or wires coming out running your factory.
It's stuff like this NI compactrio:
https://www.ni.com/en/shop/compactrio.html?cid=PSEA-7013q000...
You create and debug the labview program on your pc, you then compile and send it to the compactrio device, which itself runs rtos Linux and then runs your compiled code.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#5I've seen lots of shops running labview, but never on a Mac. I doubt NI's losing many customers with this move. Maybe with a focus on Windows they can finally implement zooming in and out of VIs. It's like a text editor that doesn't let you change the font size. Probably in the pocket of Big Monitor.
Agreed, education is the only market I can think of for labview on a mac.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#6I've seen lots of shops running labview, but never on a Mac. I doubt NI's losing many customers with this move. Maybe with a focus on Windows they can finally implement zooming in and out of VIs. It's like a text editor that doesn't let you change the font size. Probably in the pocket of Big Monitor.
Agreed, education is the only market I can think of for labview on a mac.
I think most university labs run Labview on Windows these days.
I know Labview has a history of running on classic Macs, but I don't think I've seen Labview on Mac ever.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#7Ouch. For reference, LabVIEW is used by many types of engineers, especially industrial process engineers to develop custom control systems, say controlling the automation of steelworks. It involves visual programming and process engineering. This will hurt industry because it regresses development and production environments onto a monoculture of Windows with some Linux. A problem of supporting and using non-Windows…
This is true, but no one in the industrial world is using macs. You even address this in your first paragraph. No IT group in their right mind is going to add a 3rd environment to manage (apple). Beyond being a headache to have multiple operating systems, update orchestrators, etc. it's also a nightmare because you can't get a 24h on site support contract from Apple. I'm surprised labview was supporting mac users in the first place, that's just a waste of development resources.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#8I remember seeing LabVIEW ads in MacWorld magazine as a teen in the 80's. (The Mac 128k was our first family computer; it eventually got upgraded to a Mac Plus) I never had reason to use it but it was very well-known in the Mac space (which I was part of for decades).
The end of an era.
As a "conscientious Windows objector", I've made do on Linux for the past 2 years once I finally figured out the only sane distro (NixOS). I have most of the best of everything now- Full speed gaming, almost all dev tooling, emulation, declarative configuration, ZFS on root, etc. etc.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#9Unsurprising really. I've only ever seen LabVIEW running on Windows machines. Hopefully this will allow them to ease up a bit on maintenance work and tackle some of their long, long overdue technical debt. Perhaps they can have a file format that's compatible with version control instead of using a modified version of the Macintosh resource fork format, for one.
Re: LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades
#10> "you can continue using the LabVIEW 2023 Q3 for macOS development system indefinitely."
In my experience it is not very long before an update nails MacOS software if you don't actively maintain it. "Indefinitely", if you turn off updates and keep your hardware alive.