LabVIEW
Why was LabVIEW embedded discontinued?
Solved!
Because it is unsupportable. LabVIEW Embedded provided hooks that could be used to integrate the toolchain of an embedded target into it. Besides some according hook VIs that invoked the specific toolchain (which had to be able to compile C++ code) the toolkit would translate the VIs into (rather convoluted C++ code) that was then compiled by the according toolchain.
It meant a number of things:
- The user of such a solution still needed the usually considerably expensive embedded compiler toolchain for his specific target such as Keil or IAR.
- He needed to be intimately familiar with that toolchain to:
1) integrate it into the LabVIEW build system
2) to create the according glue code in C(++) and the header defines that translated the LabVIEW generic macros into compiler and hardware specific function calls.
The result was that you needed to be a fairly good programmer in the embedded toolchain that was required, to be able to do that and such people generally feel of LabVIEW as a child toy they wouldn’t even touch with a ten foot pole.
So the pretty much only working implementations were for the 3 targets that NI had created example code for. And yes NI could have chosen to provide professional support for this, except that any such support contract would have needed to be in the higher 5 digit dollar region to be reasonably covering for the cost, so a pretty tough sale.
Also, the price of the Embedded Toolkit, which allowed to be adapted to any 32-bit compatible embedded platform was itself already exorbitantly priced as it came included with a fixed number of support incidents by a professional NI engineer, not a first line call center employee.
I’m not sure how many such licenses NI sold but it can’t be much. We used a trial license for a while but had to conclude that the entire thing was to complicated and therefore costly to really get working for different targets. There were problems that NI would have needed to address but since it was a low priority part of LabVIEW with little chance to earn any significant revenue, it did not receive the necessary resources.
NI eventually decided that the effort needed to keep supporting and maintaining it would be many times higher than what they reasonably can expect it to earn so its demise was unavoidable.
