mmcorec

MMCoreC is an experimental C lanugage interface to micro-manager MMCore. Wraps MMCore C++ static library into a C interface DLL. C header eliminates all 3-rd party dependencies and provides better compatibility with other languages.

Currently provides only a small subset of the MMCore API, mostly camera functions. Intended for the proof of concept only.

Use Visual Studio 2019 to build the project.

To test with C++ use MMCCDemo project. A trivial example of how to create a project that uses MMCoreC with C++.

To test with C use MMCCDemo_C project. This example is more involved than the one above as it exercises the camera API. If you just build and run, there will be errors, as the the project does not contain any device adapters. To run without errors this project requires that mmgr_dal_DemoCamera.dll is present in the working directory. This file shold be manually copied from the original micro-manager distribution or from the mmcoreAndDevices sub-module, after the build has finished.

Notes

• the header and all API calls have "g2s_" prefix. This is a remnant from the other "g2s" project where the idea of the MMCore wrapper originated. This prefix will be eliminated in the future revisions
• the MMCoreC DLL allows only a single static instance. In the next revision we will introduce handles to multiple core instances.
• the API is only a small subset of the MMCore API, just enough to demonstrate the idea.
• MMCoreC is a straight pass through to MMCore, i.e. using MMCore instance in a "pimpl" pattern. But potentially, we can do much more than that, in effect enhancing and extending the functionality of the original MMCore while retaining functional backward compatibility.

Goals

• simplify interfacing with high-level languages: C interface DLL (or dylib) is natively supported in most languages, so no need for SWIG.
• simplify interfacing with C/C++: MMCoreC.h does not have any 3rd-party dependencies, one can just drop in the DLL binary and start coding.
• easy to build: the project depends only on small subset of boost in order to build the MMCore submodule dependency.
• a wrapper around the original MMCore might be good way to introduce the next version of the API, as we can easily extend and improve function under the hood, but without disrupting the original MMCore.