Right, though I think it would be fairly straightforward to make a bridge. This is all pretty cool, but I think I'd really want something lower level than a RESTful API for streaming data from a SLS or a LIDAR to assemble into a costmap. I see they've included OpenCV in their system but no PCL[1]. I suppose that makes sense since you can just connect a camera to your OpenCV handler directly but when you're using pointcloads you're usually combining a bunch of them.

Of course, when I create my Nim or Rust based robotics framework in my Copious Spare Time I'm going to use a pub-sub network where you can declare topics to be local-reliable (shared memory), global-reliable (tcp), or global-unreliable (udp-based).

[1]http://www.pointclouds.org/

I like that vision of pub-sub, BTW. It helps to make things explicit (and bar access when it would conflict).

I agree that PCL integration is a must for larger robot platforms.

I'm unsure I understand their "platforms" argument - OpenCV as platform?

It's nice to hear that you are considering using Nim for this.

ROS has an entirely different target group. You'll never be able to run ROS on a traditional robotics / IoT framework. We're talking KBs of RAM; kilo/megahertz CPU speeds; minimal power consumption.