LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades | Hacker News Reader

LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades

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40 pointsjparmer25 comments

I've seen lots of shops running labview, but never on a Mac. I doubt NI's losing many customers with this move.

Maybe with a focus on Windows they can finally implement zooming in and out of VIs. It's like a text editor that doesn't let you change the font size. Probably in the pocket of Big Monitor.

Agreed, education is the only market I can think of for labview on a mac.

I think most university labs run Labview on Windows these days.

I know Labview has a history of running on classic Macs, but I don't think I've seen Labview on Mac ever.

They already did in the past, Apple doesn't have that big customer size outside US and similar economies.

The Quadras and LC on my campus back in the day were a very special breed, as the IT department even had a couple of NeXT cubes.

The peasants would get thin terminals to DG/UX and later on Red-Hat, or Windows 3.x/95/NT, depending on the laboratory.

It's not like you often see Macs in education, even among students !

I personally manage a lab of Macs running LabView at a university, in a department that uses at least 75% Macs overall.

> Maybe with a focus on Windows they can finally implement zooming in and out of VIs

Can I Zoom In or Out in the LabVIEW Block Diagram? https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z000...

>The zoom in and zoom out feature in LabVIEW is only available starting from LabVIEW 2023 Q3.

We really live in the end of times!

Holy moley, that does explain those 4 skinny dudes on horses I saw the other night. This'll enable crazy large single-VI spaghetti monsters. There'll need to be a Guinness record for geometrically largest VI.

Next step is 3D VIs built using VR headsets. I'll buy an oculus and renew my labview cert when that day comes. Setting up communication with a lab instrument over a shoddy USB connection will feel like hacking the Gibson.

> "you can continue using the LabVIEW 2023 Q3 for macOS development system indefinitely."

In my experience it is not very long before an update nails MacOS software if you don't actively maintain it. "Indefinitely", if you turn off updates and keep your hardware alive.

> In my experience it is not very long before an update nails MacOS software if you don't actively maintain it.

That's not my experience.

Of course the removal of 32-bit support in macOS Catalina was a killer, but otherwise I regularly use a number of older apps.

Here's a notable example: via Rosetta, I'm still using the preference pane RCDefaultApp 2.1, which was last updated in 2009. It still works 14 years later! https://rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/index.html#versio...

I think it very much depends what bits of the OS you are working with. I had an application I had a part in maintaining get nailed repeatedly by each generation of Apple Silicon and OS updates. It was working quite close to hardware though

Ouch.

For reference, LabVIEW is used by many types of engineers, especially industrial process engineers to develop custom control systems, say controlling the automation of steelworks. It involves visual programming and process engineering. This will hurt industry because it regresses development and production environments onto a monoculture of Windows with some Linux. A problem of supporting and using non-Windows platforms is that many custom tools, drivers, and interfacing environments only support Windows.

As another point, securing industrial systems is critical, so production systems running LabVIEW should be locked down using extreme measures because of the potential harm of compromise. Remember Stuxnet. (Which would make a neat Hollywood movie.)

Most things running labview for critical applications like you mention use labvew to write the program and then send the program to a embedded target device that actually runs it.

Rarely anymore do we have a PC with a bunch or wires coming out running your factory.

It's stuff like this NI compactrio:

https://www.ni.com/en/shop/compactrio.html?cid=PSEA-7013q000...

You create and debug the labview program on your pc, you then compile and send it to the compactrio device, which itself runs rtos Linux and then runs your compiled code.

This is true, but no one in the industrial world is using macs. You even address this in your first paragraph. No IT group in their right mind is going to add a 3rd environment to manage (apple). Beyond being a headache to have multiple operating systems, update orchestrators, etc. it's also a nightmare because you can't get a 24h on site support contract from Apple. I'm surprised labview was supporting mac users in the first place, that's just a waste of development resources.

Macs lack expansion ports.

Unsurprising really. I've only ever seen LabVIEW running on Windows machines. Hopefully this will allow them to ease up a bit on maintenance work and tackle some of their long, long overdue technical debt. Perhaps they can have a file format that's compatible with version control instead of using a modified version of the Macintosh resource fork format, for one.

As far as I remember there was a time LabVIEW only ran on Mac's, but admittedly back then the only common GUI machines around were Mac's and Sun workstations. (Windows existed but was in it's barely usable pre 3.11 state).

This seems to be happening a lot lately. Just this year, Visual Studio, Counter Strike 2, and now LabVIEW.

I'm no game dev, what I gather is that Apple hasn't been very friendly in terms of graphics drivers and compatibility in general. There was that article a little while ago where some company implemented a fully compliant Vulkan for Apple Silicon better than Apple did? If Apple makes it more difficult almost on purpose, why should developers come to the table when their target audience isn't on the platform?

I get the impression that mac-specific tools work very smoothly and nicely, but cross-compatible tools suffer needlessly.

For Valve at least the decision seems to make sense - Linux has overtaken macOS in their hardware survey. No doubt Steam Deck and Proton have a hand in it.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/10/september-2023-steam-s...

Apple didn't support Vulkan at all so that would be an easy task :p. Asahi's OpenGL support is now extending farther than Apple's on macOS though, which is problematic if you don't want to use Metal or one of the comparability layers for it. A big difficulty was dropping 32 bit, and now having ARM as the primary architecture (though Rosetta 2 will work surprisingly well).

And it's just the start I believe. Nobody want to admit it but Apple is extremely uncompetitive with their current hardware offering that is completely locked up. Those companies sees that it is not worth investing in this dead end. They understand the clients they have will figure this out eventually and switch with them in the long run. macOS doesn't offer anything special that would warrant focus in itself and the hardware can be interesting only if you want to lower power consumption for some reason (without considering other factors).

Awwwww fuck.

Digilent is a National business unit, and I use their Analog Discovery devices day-in and day-out on a Mac. They're way better than Saleae Logics. If NI is dropping OSX support for LabVIEW, then Waveforms will be collateral damage. Fuck.

It doesn't mean it stops working, though, right? (I too made tons of use of NI on macos)

I remember seeing LabVIEW ads in MacWorld magazine as a teen in the 80's. (The Mac 128k was our first family computer; it eventually got upgraded to a Mac Plus) I never had reason to use it but it was very well-known in the Mac space (which I was part of for decades).

The end of an era.

As a "conscientious Windows objector", I've made do on Linux for the past 2 years once I finally figured out the only sane distro (NixOS). I have most of the best of everything now- Full speed gaming, almost all dev tooling, emulation, declarative configuration, ZFS on root, etc. etc.

I wasn't even aware it had a Mac version.

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