Long and love-rate (more rate than love) relationship, take mostly of this review with a grant of salt.
ROS (started in 2010) have some great tools visualize topics, send and debug messages, check frequencies, and much more. It's also possible to use more advanced tools and solutions like: rviz, gmapping, rtabmap, stereo_image_proc and the list goes on. With ROS, it's possible to take advantage of all drivers that exist for different pieces of hardware. Keep in mind that this is possible, but not easy, usually the drivers need specific configuration, custom settings and may give as output really complex data that needs to be processed or analyzed by another program.
ROS uses [catkin](https://github.com