In the last few weeks, there have been lots of posts from people trying to
implement various functionality in CINs, having trouble building CINs,
crashing their VIs after calling CINs, etc. We at NI are interested in the
reasons people are choosing to use CINs rather than shared libraries (DLLs).
The most obvious advantage is that you don't need to carry around an extra
file; I'm sure that's important to some people. What other reasons do you
have? Are there people out there that are really using CINLoad, etc?

This question is motivated in part by the fact that CINs are inherently
difficult for us to support; any time a new version of a compiler is
released, there is a good chance that part of our CIN documentation will
instantly become obsolete. The fact that the list of supported compilers on
the various platforms is already fairly large complicates this.

On the other hand, I know of no modern compiler that can't painlessly create
a DLL, and I don't see many posts on info-LabVIEW from users struggling to
build DLLs.

CINs existed in LabVIEW long before DLLs were in vogue, and we've maintained
support for them through the current version with no plans to stop doing so.
But I'm interested in hearing from the LabVIEW community now. Speak up if
you prefer CINs, and tell us why. (Also speak up if you prefer DLLs).

Steven Harrison
National Instruments