Cannot Run LabWindows™/CVI™ on System With Date After Year 2038

Updated Sep 29, 2023

Reported In

Software

  • LabWindows/CVI

Issue Details

LabWindows/CVI fails to start if the computer clock is after the year 2038. If LabWindows/CVI is open and the clock is set past 2038, the IDE won't be able to compile or save any files, resulting in an irrecoverable error and force close. Also, any 32-bit applications compiled in LabWindows/CVI before 2038 and then ran after 2038 fail to start.

Solution

The Year 2038 problem is a time formatting bug in computer systems that represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. This problem exists in systems that measure Unix time – the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970) – and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. 

In order to work around this issue you can follow these alternatives:
  • Compile the application using the 64-bit configuration since time is measured with signed 64-bit integers.
  • If using the LabWindows/CVI IDE then you need to change the system time since the development environment itself is a 32-bit application.

NI considers LabWindows/CVI to be feature-complete and we plan no new major releases. We release patches to fix critical runtime issues with no workaround. In this case, because there is a workaround, we do not intend to include a fix in a future patch. For more information about the software lifecycle policies please take a look at the following document: Software Product Lifecycle Policies.

Additional Information

In 2038, the LabWindows/CVI installer might not work as expected on newer versions of Windows due to new Windows features developed in 18 years or dependencies that CVI has, like Windows 8.1 SDK, will be deprecated for so long that the CVI installer will not be able to download them anymore.