Build ROS code cpp without Catkin Package

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If you look at what actually gets imported when you type import rospy you will find that it pulls in an enormous amount of code. C++ includes tend to be a lot more granular and manual.

For anything beyond some basic publisher and subscriber functionality for monitoring/interacting with ROS systems you'll probably find that it's unworkably cumbersome to satisfy C++ dependencies without building your projects in a full ROS/Catkin environment. In addition to locating and including all relevant headers, you need to find all shared library objects and link to those.

You could theoretically skip Catkin and ROS packaging and just work with plain CMake to find the packages you need to include and link with your C++ code. HOwever, that will likely make it harder to break your project into several logically independent components. Catkin is there to help you build several packages that depend on each other in the order they're needed in the source dependency graph.