Petition for NI to implement C99 standards into CVI

[DanielGreen]

This is not a demanding petition, this is a statement of belief, I honestly think that many of the users here will agree that Labwindows CVI's compiler and IDE should be brought up to ANSI - C99 standards.  If you are intersted I've linked to an online petition, please support this cause, if enough of us voice our desire National Instruments is more likely to make this a priority.




http://www.petitiononline.com/63123706/petition.html

[menchar]

I second this.

BUT - I've been asking for this literally for years with no response - I think they're immune to it ...

Menchar

[DanielGreen]

7 signatures is a start, I'm hoping for 500 or so tho.

[DanielGreen]

tell anyone you know who uses CVI to sign this please, friends and co-workers especially.

[wally_666]

What exactly would be the benefits of doing so?

I'd much rather see the effort put into a native IDE for Linux or even a better install proceedure to support a broader spectrum of Linux distributions, although I didn't have any real issues getting the Linux runtime to work on Ubuntu 6.06 using alien --to-deb --scripts on the rpm files.  But then I didn't need to compile the mx or VISA kernel modules since I don't use them.

I think there are lots of other more important things for the CVI developers to work on.

--wally.

[menchar]

How many CVI developers are targeting Linux / Unix?  I would guess the majority of CVI developers are on Win32 / Win64 PC's.

NI hasn't done much of anything language-wise with CVI for a long long time, and doesn't appear to be planning on doing much any time soon.  C99 would be an incremental enhancement, and for those of us who do a lot of C coding (I write on average 5 to 10 thousand lines of C code / year), both psychic relief and a non-trivial improvement.

Why not Java support for that matter?  With the RTSJ, NI could even get that to work with their "realtime" x86 initiative.  We'd get a huge language improvement.  NI could use the native interface to hook up their C based libraries.    Java syntax is based on C's, and schools use Java as a teaching language - young developers will know OO and Java right out of the box and would be able to concentrate on domain knowledge issues.

But I wouldn't hold my breath.  The great majority of SW development system sales for NI is LabView, not CVI.

C is the lingua franca of scientific/technical/systems programming and will remain an important programming language for a long long time.  C99 fixed many very annoying language limitations and should not be that hard to implement. 

Menchar

[Mert_A.]

FYI, a few C99 features are implemented in CVI 8.5 (which some of you SSP customers may have already received).  As the post states, only a few features are implemented, so CVI 8.5 is still not C99 compliant.  However, if you find the features useful and wish to use them, you just need to add #pragma to your source.

Mert A.
National Instruments

[menchar]

I think a bone's just been tossed our way.

Block scope variable declaration anywhere in the block could be the most bang for the buck as far as C99 features.

Menchar

[AlEng]

I agree with wally_666.  I would like to see a Linux version.  I would also like to see them bring the Sun Solaris version up to date.  However, I have been working with Labwindows/CVI for 15 years (since the DOS days), and I do not see much hope in this every happening.  I once asked (somewhere around 1992) when their compiler was going to be ANSI compliant.  I was told, "No one uses ANSI compilers."  A few years later they updated their compiler to ANSI spec (for the time).  A few years later I asked if they were think about C++.  I was told, "No one uses C++."  A few years later they started the marriage with Microsoft, and provided the C++ via Microsoft's C++ compiler.

We are still using the Solaris (Sun) version of Labwindos/CVI, but National Instruments has stopped updating it (stopped at version 5.0.1).

I gave up asking a long time ago for ANSI compliance and cross platform support.  National Instruments is like much of the rest of the world.  If it isn't Windows, it is not worth their time.

Wayne Wilkinson
Alcatel-Lucent

[LuisG]

Hello Wayne,

First, let me say how much I appreciate the fact that you've been using CVI for so long. You raise some valid points about our history, and I'm not going to try to justify some of those past statements, which frankly seem quite asinine to me.

As far as CVI and Unix is concerned, as you know, NI did support Solaris up until version 5.0 of CVI, and the reason we stopped supporting it, frankly, was because the sales became negligible at that point. To the extent that we could no longer justify the engineering cost of maintaining both versions. Shortly thereafter, we started receiving some requests for a Linux version. We tried to gauge the amount of interest as best we could, and when it became large enough, we decided to invest the effort of creating a CVI runtime module for Linux -- basically, not the full ADE, but something that would allow you to build and run your applications in Linux. This addressed the majority of our requests at the time, and the idea was that we would monitor feedback from that point on, and see how much interest there would be for NI to support the full-blown ADE in Linux. That's where we stand today. So to summarize, I want to reassure you that we do monitor user feedback and do respond to it, but it's also true that the interest needs to rise to a certain level before we can justify shifting resources from one feature to another.

Hopefully, that makes sense

Thanks again for the feedback!

Luis

NI