lcm-proj/lcm

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1211 stars · 431 forks observed · 2026-10-20

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

LCM (Lightweight Communications and Marshalling) is a set of libraries and tools for low-latency, high-bandwidth publish/subscribe message passing with type-safe marshalling code generation. It targets real-time systems such as robotics, supports multiple languages (C, C++, Java, Python, Lua, MATLAB), and requires no central broker or daemons.

Use cases

• pass sensor data between processes in a robotics stack with low latency
• generate type-safe message serialization code for multiple languages
• broadcast messages over UDP multicast without a central broker
• log and replay message streams for debugging
• build real-time inter-process communication for embedded or simulation systems

When to choose

• you need low-latency pub/sub messaging for real-time or robotics systems
• you want automatic marshalling codegen across C, C++, Java, Python, and Lua
• you want a dependency-light, daemon-free messaging layer
• you need efficient UDP multicast broadcast on a LAN

When to avoid

• you need messaging over the internet or across unreliable WANs
• you require brokered features like queues, persistence, or guaranteed delivery
• you need Go or C#/.NET bindings, which are unmaintained
• you want a modern ecosystem with rich tooling like Kafka or DDS

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization message-queue middleware networking robotics microservices embedded-systems windows python jvm cpp c lua pub-sub udp-multicast marshalling code-generation real-time-systems inter-process-communication real-time linux macos

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