Building DLLs.

[xkenneth]

All,

   I just have a couple questions about building DLLs from LabVIEW.

Can I build a DLL that is callable in linux in LabVIEW for windows? IE is it generic or tied to LV/Win?

Can I build a DLL using the Linux/Mac version of LabVIEW?

   I'm evaluating architecting a bit of code in LabVIEW versus C on the terms of portability.

- Ken 

[LV_Pro]

I'm going to say no, you can't build a dll in Windows that will run in either Linux or MacOs, they are totally different. Sort of like writing a "library" in German for a someone that only speaks English to read. Yes you can build a dll in either linux or MacOS that will run on those systems.  Mac OS Shared libraries must have a .framework extension. Linux Shared libraries must have a .so extension, at least in the LabVIEW 8.2 versions, not certain in 2009.  Hope it helps.

[xkenneth]

That's fine. Although I do believe if you're using a very vanilla C  function and compiling for the same architecture you're not going to do anything OS specific.

- Ken 

[smercurio_fc]

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xkenneth wrote:

Although I do believe if you're using a very vanilla C  function and compiling for the same architecture you're not going to do anything OS specific.

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I have no idea what this means. It's also irrelevant. Whether or not you are doing anything OS specific has no bearing on whether you can build a Windows DLL on Linux. They are two totally different architectures. While the source code may be portable, the compiled code is not. You would need to use a different language like Java, though you would need the OS-specific Java runtime in order to actually run the Java code. 

[LV_Pro]

Let me rephrase that. As far as I know you can't build a dll in LabVIEW Windows for any other platform. As was pointed out, you could develop a LabVIEW dll and take the source code to the other platforms. LabVIEW has been cross platform since around v3 (I remember proudly showing my associates at GE how I could make a program on Windows, the run it on the Sun workstation and Mac I had in my cube). There are a number of features available on the Windows platform that aren't available on the other, unfortunately, so if your source uses them ... Despite the Macs using Intel (or similar architecture) processors, the OS is totally different, so the lower level code, resulting from the compilation of the source, would be different.