libtcspc

Status: C++ library usable but no stable API; Python bindings in progress.

libtcspc is a C++20 header-only library for processing photon timestamp event streams produced by TCSPC (time-correlated single photon counting) or time tagging hardware. It is designed for live stream processing of data being acquired or replayed from disk.

Requirements

The C++ library requires C++20. Recent versions of GCC, Clang, or MSVC should work.

The Python library (under development) requires Python 3.10 or later and a C++ build environment (at run time, since C++ code is dynamically generated and compiled).

• On Windows, Visual Studio (2022+) with "C++ Desktop Development" is required.
• On macOS, Apple's latest Command Line Tools should be sufficient.

How to build

libtcspc for C++ is a header-only library, so there is nothing to build. Just add the include/ directory to your project's include path.

To build the unit tests and example programs, use Meson:

pip install meson ninja
meson setup builddir
meson test -C builddir

Performance

It should be noted that libtcspc benefits greatly from compiler optimization. With Visual C++, an improvement of over 50-fold was observed between Debug (/MDd /Od /RTC1) and Release (/MD /O2 /Oi /GL) in an early test.

Non-goals

libtcspc is about photon timestamp streams, histograms, and other streaming or in-memory data, not file format and metadata handling. Although vendor-specific hardware data streams are supported, supporting the reading and writing of vendor-specific disk file formats (such as .spc, .sdt, .ptu, .phu) is out of scope. A separate library should handle that.