LabView celebrates 20th anniversary with new version, new features
By Dan Strassberg, Contributing Technical Editor -- EDN, August 8, 2006
The lifetime of successful programming languages is approximately 50 years, according to James Truchard, PhD, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of National Instruments. That's an amazing amount of time in this era of product lifetimes that are typically months rather than years. NI's flagship product, LabView, an application-development environment that embodies its own graphical-programming language, is now 20 years old. In honor of that milestone, NI is announcing Version 8.20 and is looking at LabView's future path for the next 30 years. Although LabView doesn't try to be all things to all people and is not as ubiquitous as applications such as word processors and general-purpose spreadsheets, it continues to spread its wings wider to support an ever-broadening spectrum of applications in engineering and science. The software has a diverse range of capabilities and uses, most notably now including system-level EDA, embedded-system development, and FPGA-based rapid prototyping, and the user base continues it high regard for the package's ease of use.
Among the key additions to V8.20 is MathScript, which allows algorithm development in such text-based third-party packages as the Mathworks' Matlab and Comsol's Comsol Script. Version 8.20 also supports object-oriented programming with the ability to create classes and objects; encapsulate data and methods; define methods as public, private, or protected; and more. This version also improves on LabView's control-system-development capabilities with, among other upgrades, a 14-times speed increase in execution of PID (proportional-integral-derivative) algorithms. LabView lets you take advantage of multicore CPUs, which are rapidly becoming standard in PCs. Order-of-magnitude execution-speed improvements are common when you move LabView applications from conventional processors to dual-core units. Prices for LabView start at $1199.
