Is it possible to build and run a cpp nodelet without Catkin or rosbuild??

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Thanks, Geoff. I appreciate your time. Quick followup: Is there a way to give ROS visibility to the nodelet's shared object without the package infrastructure or do I need to create a package?

Other nodes will be using pluginlib to discover and load the nodelet (ie: shared library), and pluginlib uses rospkg. The latter will only consider directories with a manifest in them as "ROS packages", so at the very minimum you'd have to place a package.xml with the correct contents in a directory. That manifest could then point to wherever the shared library is which hosts the nodelet class.

As "a directory with a manifest" is basically the definition of a package (at least at the file system level), theoretically this could work, but you'd essentially still be creating a package.

Edit: that's assuming the consumers of your nodelet-not-built-using-Catkin are in fact regular ROS nodes.

Edit 2: perhaps also good to mention: Catkin the CMake macros/functions/syntactic sugar != catkin_make (ie: the tool). Those are often confused/conflated.