Question

I am writing an application using labview and need to use external code. I have read that using CINs are old fashioned and ‘wrong’ to use. Is this correct? Should I use shared dlls instead?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of both methods?

Answer 1

I don’t have personal experience of writing external code to be called by LabVIEW, but from the NI knowledge base: ‘When given the choice, a DLL is the choice to make.’

The advantages they list include:

• Many processes can share a single copy of the DLL in memory
• Many applications can share a single copy of the DLL on disk
• Modifying the functions in a DLL does not require a recompile of the calling application
• Only certain (obsolete?) development environments are supported for creating CINs.

Potential disadvantages of DLLs are:

• The first two items on the list above 😉
• You need to remember to include the DLL as a support file when building an application from LabVIEW
• CIN code can be platform independent, while DLL/shared libraries may need rewriting for each platform.

I’m pretty sure that every time I have seen this discussion in several years of following LabVIEW lists and forums the advice has been the same: CINs are obsolete, use DLLs – just be aware of the potential issues they can cause.