mrtb

Researchers, hobbyists, and some industry professionals (for prototyping?) seem to love ROS for its big community, logging/debugging/visualisation tools (rosbag, rviz), the pub/sub architecture (easy integration and loose coupling with third party modules), existing support for many sensors/peripherals/hardware components; plus off-the-shelf libs for SLAM, navigation, inverse kinematics, etc.

But ROS is hated by others for its custom build system (on top of CMake), the custom language-agnostic IDL for message types (like Protobuf but worse, esp. for versioning and backwards compatibility), non-determinism and untestability of the pub/sub model (esp. for safety-critical stuff), overengineering and layers of indirection / learning curve, poor performance, and high platform lock-in.

Looking at ROS as a robotics noob, it seems like useful 'muddleware' for toy projects, but where every sub-problem that it abstracts away from you can be solved better by other existing tools. I'm looking more into: Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit [1], Yet Another Robot Platform [2], genom3 [3], and Open Robot Control Software [4] (all C++). Or the Rust ones like RoboPLC [5], Dora-rs [6], Copper-rs [7], and Basis [8] (which supports Protobuf!).

If you're not using ROS for a "serious" project, do you use other middleware offerings or just pick 'n' mix lower-level libs tailored for your use cases?