Latest version of National Instruments' LabVIEW graphical programming environment for design, test, measurement and control applications has been developed to deliver time savings through new features such as off-the-shelf compiler technologies able to execute code an average of 20 per cent faster. There is also a comprehensive marketplace for evaluating and purchasing add-on toolkits for easily integrating custom functionality into the platform.
For field-programmable gate array (FPGA) users, the new LabVIEW 2010 delivers a new IP Integration Node that makes it possible to integrate any third-party FPGA IP into LabVIEW applications — it is also compatible with the Xilinx CORE Generator. NI has also implemented more than a dozen new features into LabVIEW 2010 that were suggested by lead users through the LabVIEW Idea Exchange, an online feedback forum that marks a significant new level of collaboration between NI r&d and customers.
“LabVIEW users are some of the most innovative people in the world, and their input helps us make LabVIEW an ever more effective and productive programming tool,” said Jeff Kodosky, NI Business and Technology fellow, and the Cofounder and ‘Father' of LabVIEW. “With LabVIEW 2010, we have taken their feedback and suggestions and opened up the platform to further customisation so that our customers and partners can expand LabVIEW to new applications that have not yet experienced the power and efficiency of graphical programming.”
Key to the productivity delivered by LabVIEW is the compiler, which abstracts tasks such as memory allocation and thread management. The compiler hierarchy has evolved over the lifetime of LabVIEW to become smarter and more optimised. With LabVIEW 2010, the compiler data flow intermediate representation has been further optimised, and Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), an open source compiler infrastructure, has been added to the software’s compiler flow to accelerate code execution.
NI has conducted benchmarks ranging from real-world customer applications to low-level functions, and the new compiler delivers an average improvement of 20 per cent across these benchmarks.
