Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM)

LCM is a set of libraries and tools for message passing and data marshalling, targeted at real-time systems where high-bandwidth and low latency are critical. It provides a publish/subscribe message passing model and automatic marshalling/unmarshalling code generation with bindings for applications in a variety of programming languages.

Roadmap

The LCM project is active again. The current near-term plan is to:

• Clear deprecation warnings from build for all language targets
• Flush backlog of PRs
• Cut a new release

Quick Links

• LCM downloads
• Website and documentation

Features

• Low-latency inter-process communication
• Efficient broadcast mechanism using UDP Multicast
• Type-safe message marshalling
• User-friendly logging and playback
• No centralized "database" or "hub" -- peers communicate directly
• No daemons
• Few dependencies

Supported platforms and languages

• Platforms:
  • GNU/Linux
    • Ubuntu (20.04 and 22.04)
    • Fedora (37)
  • macOS (11 and 12)
  • Windows (2019 and 2022) via MSYS2
• Languages
  • C
  • C++
  • Java
  • Lua
  • MATLAB

Python

To install for a specific version of Python and interpreter first make with proper cmake flag:

 cmake -DPython_EXECUTABLE=/path/to/python(>3.6) ..

Then, install as follows:

cd lcm/lcm_python
/path/to/python(>3.6) -m pip install .

Unmaintained languages

The following languages are currently unmaintained. PRs for these languages are still welcome and if you are interested in maintaining them please let us know.

• Go
• C#/.NET