Why did NI create NI-DAQmx?
In the late 1990s, the NI-DAQ team recognized that the need to maintain API compatibility with previous releases increased the difficulty of adding new features and devices to Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy). In addition, the Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) API, through its long evolution, had developed many problems that needed to be fixed. NI-DAQ developers were having difficulty intuitively extending the API and optimizing the increasingly broad spectrum of customer applications. NI concluded that a new API design and architecture would help NI-DAQ developers more easily add new features and new devices, fix many existing driver problems, and optimize performance at the same time.
