MMCore is Micro-Manager's hardware abstraction layer, written in C++.
It provides APIs to load device adapters, control devices, and acquire data. It also implements buffering for image acquisition.
Currently, MMCore is mainly intended to be used from Python (via pymmcore) or Java (via MMCoreJ), but it can be used as a C++ library as well.
This code is available in two Git repositories:
-
https://github.com/micro-manager/mmCoreAndDevices, in subdirectory
MMCore. This is the official source for MMCore. -
https://github.com/micro-manager/mmcore, which is a mirror of the above; we do not currently accept pull requests or issues on this repository.
(The eventual goal is for MMCore to be removed from mmCoreAndDevices and for
the mmcore repository to become the official source. Until then,
mmCoreAndDevices remains the official source.)
The "supported" ways to use MMCore are via MMCoreJ (built as part of Micro-Manager) or via pymmcore(-plus). This directory contains files for the traditional build systems used by Micro-Manager (MSVC on Windows, GNU Autotools on macOS/Linux), but those are not designed to allow building just MMCore in isolation.
We are in the process of modularizing the build systems of Micro-Manager's components, and MMCore now also has cross-platform build scripts using Meson.
This can be used to build just MMCore using the mmcore repository:
git clone https://github.com/micro-manager/mmcore.git
cd mmcore
meson setup --vsenv builddir # --vsenv recommended on Windows
meson compile -C builddir
meson test -C builddirNote that the above way of building will use the latest mmdevice as a
dependency. To control the exact version of mmdevice to use, you will need to
copy it into subprojects/ before running Meson (as is done in
mmCoreAndDevices's CI).
If using MMCore as a C++ library, it should be noted that it needs to be built as a static library. Building as a DLL or shared library would require defining which symbols are public, and this is not currently available.