[oldbbsnickname]

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.)

[eyegor]

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.

[iancmceachern]

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.

[hulitu]

Macs lack expansion ports.