> The abstraction gap between RTL and FPGA hardware is enormous: it traditionally contains at least synthesis, technology mapping, and place & route—each of whi

> The abstraction gap between RTL and FPGA hardware is enormous: it traditionally contains at least synthesis, technology mapping, and place & route—each of which is a complex, slow process. As a result, the compile/edit/run cycle for RTL programming on FPGAs takes hours or days and, worse still, it’s unpredictable: the deep stack of toolchain stages can obscure the way that changes in RTL will affect the design’s performance and energy characteristics. This is basically what pushes me away from FPGAs, even though there is now icestorm so i can avoid Windows. As an outsider I totally agree with the author, I love the idea of using FPGAs as accelerators, but it's way easier to do GPGPU right now.