Yeah, the performance is still an open question I'm looking into. Fortunately, for a lot of use cases, you either want to publish or subscribe at a fixed rate and not just go as fast as the library will allow. For small messages, like vectors and poses, I didn't see any performance issues going all the way up to 500Hz. But I think passing around high bandwidth sensor data may clog it up, especially since it has to copy the entire message from the python type to the julia type or vice versa.
Going through roscpp instead of rospy is definitely an interesting question that I have not investigated. Rospy is required to introspect on the message data for the type generation but it might work to do everything else through roscpp with ccall or Keno's CXX package ( https://github.com/Keno/Cxx.jl). If performance is lacking that should definitely be the first thing to start investigating. Thanks, Josh On Friday, December 12, 2014 9:17:49 PM UTC-5, Tony Kelman wrote: > > Josh, > > This is very cool, thanks for releasing this! Some of my colleagues are > starting to use ROS and I've been gently nudging them towards Julia rather > than legacy C or Matlab solutions. The timing on this package is a > convenient coincidence. > > How much performance do you think this might be leaving on the table by > having to go through PyCall and rospy? Are most of the underlying API's > exposed through a C interface that could be wrapped directly via ccall? > > -Tony > > > On Friday, December 12, 2014 11:06:37 AM UTC-8, Josh Langsfeld wrote: >> >> After about 6 weeks of initial part-time development, I'm announcing the >> first release of the RobotOS.jl package, which enables essentially seamless >> integration of Julia code with ROS <http://wiki.ros.org> (Robot >> Operating System). At the core, it is mostly a wrapper for the rospy python >> library (many thanks to Steve Johnson for PyCall), but on top of that I >> added an automatic Julia type generation system so the back-end python >> details are completely hidden from the end-user. >> >> https://github.com/phobon/RobotOS.jl >> >> I believe the robotics community is especially well suited to adopt >> Julia, as speed and natural mathematical expressiveness are both highly >> desirable features in whichever programming language is used. For about six >> months now, I've been doing all my research in Julia and it has been vastly >> more pleasurable than using either Matlab or Python. >> >> I am quite eager to continue development on the package with whatever >> community feedback I can get but hopefully it can already prove useful to >> anyone out there who has already thought of using the two systems together. >> >> Thanks, >> >> Josh Langsfeld >> Graduate Research Assistant >> Maryland Robotics Center - UMD >> >
