support-matrix.md

Library Features and Support Matrix

Library Support

The Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript MCAP libraries are actively developed. This means that Foxglove actively pursues bug fixes and ensures conformance with the MCAP specification.

Note: This does not mean that their APIs are stable.

Feature Matrix

	Python	C++	Go	TypeScript	Swift	Rust
Indexed unordered message reading	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Timestamp-ordered message reading	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Indexed metadata reading	Yes	Yes 1	Yes 1	Yes 1	Yes 1	Yes
Indexed attachment reading	Yes	Yes 1	Yes 1	Yes 1	Yes 1	Yes
Non-materialized attachment reading	No	Yes 2	No	No	No	Yes
Non-indexed reading	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
CRC validation	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
ROS1 wrapper	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
ROS2 wrapper	Yes 3	Yes 3	No	No	No	No
Protobuf wrapper	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Record writing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Easy chunked writing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automatic summary writing	Yes 4	Yes 4	Yes 4	Yes 4	Yes 4	Yes

Footnotes

1. These readers don’t have a single call to read an attachment or metadata record by name, but do allow you to read the summary, seek to that location, read a record and parse it. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Using the MCAP Rosbag2 storage plugin. ↩

3. The C++ reader interface does not preclude one from backing it with a memory-mapped file. This could be used to implement message and attachment parsing without copying data into memory. ↩ ↩²

4. All writers currently do not compute a CRC for the DataEnd record. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵