Zeros (WIP)

A very much work in progress of an alternative ecosystem for ROS 2 development including a client library, message generation, package build support, and so on; for developing simple and efficient robotics applications while minimizing contact surface with awful languages, dreadful compile times, (micro) dependency hell, and other common afflictions.

Client library

A fully-featured (eventually) client library based on rcl and rclc.

TODO

• Context
• QoS
• Subscriptions
• Publishers
• Services
• Actions
• Parameters
• Timers
• Executors
• RMW specifics

Message generation

TODO

• Decide on external code generator executable vs. comptime. I'm not sure that fully comptime is even possible, given some Zig limitations. It would be especially hard or impossible to provide a nice API for the message types, so codegen is probably the way to go.
• A Zig message generator integrated into the ROS 2 build pipeline is not something that matches with the goals of this project. As much as practically possible we'd like to operate independent of the standard ROS 2 build environment and only interface with its artifacts as a dumb participant based on system interfaces and established conventions.

Build support

TODO

• Resource index
• Discovering transitive dependencies

Other

Longer-term ideas

• From source build of the entire ROS 2 core using the Zig build system; for cross-compilation, static linking, better control over the defaults, etc. (something a la microROS)
• A lightweight replacement of the node launch system suitable for integration with actual service managers. Likely just a set of tools for building node parameter files out of system configurations.
• A new client library built directly against a single chosen middleware, likely Zenoh. This would mainly be done to remove the layers of abstraction (complexity) at the lowest level, while also allowing full use of the capabilities offered by the middleware itself.