I'm working on a relatively large project in robotics, and I'm using rubullet for doing some simple visualization and testing in sim in example binaries. It mostly works fine, but there are two issues:
- rubullet compiles all of Bullet from scratch, which is rather time-consuming.
- rubullet also only compiles on Linux. This is quite annoying, as I'd like to have CI results for all systems and architectures.
Why not use [other thing?]
rubullet is not perfect. It's nigh-unmaintained and has some rough edges. I have a few other options, but I don't like any of them.- Expose Python bindings for my project and then use PyBullet for visualization. This is the most practical choice, but I don't want to have to introduce more dependencies and technologies if I can help it, at least for now. In the long run I will likely do this.
- Fork rubullet and fix the issues. I wouldn't really mind doing this, but I don't have that much time on my hands.
- Use Bevy+Rapier3d and make my own simulator. I would also love to to this, but I don't have six months to spare on a chase down a rabbit hole.
Currently, I have rubullet gated as a dev-dependency, as it isn't actually needed for my full crate.
[dev-dependencies]
rubullet = "0.1.0-alpha-3"
I'd like to disable rubullet on most builds, since it massively increases build time and doesn't work on every system. I can actually run most tests without it - I just use it for visual verification that trajectories are correct.
However, optional dev-dependencies don't seem to be particularly close to being usable. So I find myself in need of a workaround: how can I use rubullet in my personal Linux test examples without needing it everywhere?