Last week, we announced the 64-bit LabVIEW beta. That announcement reveals a little about how I've spent the last couple of years of my life.
A long, long time ago, when I first started at NI, we were pretty proud of the fact that LabVIEW started its life as a 32-bit Macintosh application. We didn't suffer the pains of some applications that were having to live in (and later convert from) the 16-bit DOS and Windows environments.
But in some parts of the source code, we weren't as rigorous with our data types as we should have been. I asked the guy next to me, "Hey, Steve. Should I be worried about all these places we assume pointers fit into 32 bits?"
"No," he responded, "we do that all over the place. Somebody far in the future will have to go through all of LabVIEW and fix that."
I did not know then that the "somebody" would be me.
As I alluded to in my Twenty Years post, when I first started working on this, it seemed like an insurmountable task. LabVIEW source code is big, with a lot of developers having their hands in the code over time. And it's part GUI, part compiler, part runtime engine, and part kitchen sink.
Fortunately, I soon got help—a small, but really good team—and we just started plugging away at it. The little milestones along the way...
- Compile the source code without errors
- Compile, link, and crash on launch
- Launch to Untitled 1
- Launch to the Getting Started window
- etc.
There was a snowball effect—we'd fix something, and then a whole bunch of stuff would start working.
I wouldn't say it's been easy. When we first started, I had a fair amount of skepticism... I had fears that we would hit a brick wall, or we'd discover something that would require more effort than we were willing to invest. That skepticism was justified. We had to make some tradeoffs to keep the project from getting out of hand.
From a software engineering perspective, I think we did a good job of containing the risk to 32-bit LabVIEW while pushing forward with 64-bit LabVIEW. (All the code is shared.) Perhaps more on that later.
I'm pretty happy with our level of quality in this beta release. If you've got access to a 64-bit Windows machine, I encourage you to sign up for the beta and give it a try. Here's a teaser for the kinds of things you'll be able to do. (Click to enlarge the image.)
Read more of this article...
