After getting familiar with ROS2 ecosystem and colcon build, I was looking for other tools to compile ROS1 packages as efficient as ROS2. My search led me to find catkin build. It is a way better and useful way of compiling your packages than catkin_make. Here are the main differences between them:

  • catkin build provides an isolated environment for the build which makes adding/removing packages and handling dependencies easier (like catkin_make_isolated but parallelized version)
  • catkin build provides a user friendly colored cmd output
  • catkin build allows users to get advantage of different catkin_tools like catkin locate, catkin list etc. …

If you want to learn more about the differences, check catkin tools official webpage. Maybe we should start changing ROS1 tutorials a bit! :)