LabVIEW Linux and .NET Core

[Matthew.L]

Thought I would post for other who are interested.

Microsoft is merging .NET Core and .NET with the announcement of .NET 5. (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/)

While very exciting, it should not be released until Nov 2020 and then must be incorporated into LabVIEW or LabVIEW nextgen. Once done, I would assume this would allow LV for Linux to call .NET 5 dlls, and I would assume this includes the NI RT Linux Distro.

[rolfk]

Sorry to damp your enthusiasme. But LabVIEW NXG already does support .Net as much of its UI is very much based on .Net. However LabVIEW NXG is Windows 64 bit only and that is very likely not going to change in quite some time. Even .Net Core merging with .Net is just one storey of the 20 storey LabVIEW NXG building that would make porting LabVIEW NXG to non-Windows systems more easy. The other 19 storeys are partly portable to other systems as they take quite a bit of the existing LabVIEW classic with them, but it's still going to be a pretty damn hard exercise to make that happen, so it may actually never happen. 

[Matthew.L]

Rolfk

I understand LV has been around for a long time and this would not be an easy task and I am certainly ‘over simplifying it’. I was more of pointing out that when (… like 10 years from now) LV supports doteNet 5 that at that point users should be allowed to call cross platform dlls. Unless National Instrument LabVIEW wrapper for calling dlls has custom logic that would not easily expanded to support cross platform.

And I have given up on the dream of calling .NET dlls on Linux, at least for the next 5 years. But wanted to post indicating that IF it does happen it would not be anytime soon.

[wiebe@CARYA]

NXG 1 and NXG 2 where written in .NET, but did not support .NET... I was told NXG 3 does support it. Just saying, being written for .NET is no credential for .NET support. CG is not written for .NET and does have .NET support.

For now, the run time engine is probably the biggest obstacle. Sadly, while written for .NET, the NXG RTE is pretty much the same as CG's RTE. This means NXG compiles VIs to x86\x64 intel CPU instructions, and executes them in the x86\x64 RTE. This is a deliberate choice, they didn't want to start over completely. I'm not sure if there are plans to ever change this. For me, it seems silly not to, but there are huge financial forces involved.

[nlhnt]

Sorry for posting in an old thread but since some time we got some novelties and it would be interesting to know what's NI is planning.

So how does that align with the knowledge we have today? Microsoft has plans to merge .NET core and .NET in the next major release (5).

Source: https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md

Just read more than the first page, sorry for the garbage reply.

A joke: We could all just choose Rust as the only language worthy of respect. It is more or less capable of creating C-compatible libraries, doesn't have a garbage collector and is easily embedded into LabVIEW.
But... It is aot compiled to binary which means you have to create a build and manage it for all different platforms your clients and use-cases require.