Re:Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing...
by dimatura on Monday September 10, 2018 @08:14PM
(#17956192)
Super useful, in fact. A lot of the code I write follows a typical pattern of bottleneck code in C++ with python wrappers, or a mixture of pure python nodes (for the things that don't have to be super fast) and pure C++ nodes. This is fairly common throughout ROS. If catkin played better with current Python packaging and virtual environment systems (virtualenv/conda) it would be so much better, though.
I can appreciate that if you're writing C++ with some Python, this is probably useful. My experience with it was a project that was entirely written in Python, and suddenly having a complex, unfamiliar build system to deal with definitely felt like unnecessary complexity.
As you say, it's a hard problem. You could imagine an easier option for pure Python code, but that just moves the hurdle to the first time you want to compile something in C++.