Integration with RobotOS.jl for arbitrary message types?

[jdlangs]

Hi @damiendr, I just discovered this package today and was excited to see more robotics / ROS development happening in Julia.

I saw that you currently provide some basic support for bags of arbitrary message types but there's still some work required from the user to make it work seamlessly. Would you be interested in exploring options for plugging into the automatic message type generation from RobotOS? Since it already handles dependencies, I could envision it being relatively straightforward to just ask RobotOS to generate whatever types exist in a bag and then go from there.

Anyways, let me know what you think and if you'd be interested in putting together a plan.

Thanks,
Josh

[damiendr]

Hi @jdlangs, good to see there is interest in this! I agree that it would be good to have a more seamless way to generate custom types. From my perspective there are two things to figure out:

• the main goal of this package is to let users get data out of ROS bags without having to install ROS first, which can be a bit of a hassle on some platforms like MacOS. For instance, imagine you're working on machine learning and you don't really need a working ROS install — you just want to use a ROS bag as a dataset. Can we make this work without introducing a hard dependency on ROS?
• Can we have fast I/O for generated types? This involves both a fast read() method and playing nice with type inference.

[colinxs]

@jdlangs @damiendr I made an ugly PR that addresses this. Want to discuss further?