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"People used to say that about compilers" Yes. Very talented engineers are paid large sums of money to work on open source compilers when the company's main co
by analognoise 7y ago
"People used to say that about compilers"
Yes. Very talented engineers are paid large sums of money to work on open source compilers when the company's main concern is NOT compilers - Red Hat wants the compilers stable on Linux, and helps out. Same for apple. Etc, etc.
"Open Source" is just somebody else footing the bill because it IS NOT the main business concern - compilers aren't your product differentiator, but you need them to work on your systems, you pay talented engineers to work on them.
This dynamic DOES NOT HOLD for FPGAs. There is no "second source" of Xilinx FPGAs. Nobody will pitch in to help Xilinx because the only people who employ an army of talented people with the direct niche skills needed are their competitors.
F/OSS software is not great once you get past small, single use tools. KiCad became barely useable in Version 5, and it's still a decade behind what we had commercially a decade ago - and there are probably what, 500 PCB designers for every ASIC designer? 50 for every FPGA designer?
Xilinx and Intel fund programs at schools to develop talent they can use to further develop their systems and chips. That's remarkably NARROW.
In short: No, this tool will NEVER achieve critical mass, unless Lattice decides to support it directly - and then it still won't work on Xilinx chips. It is an absolute dead end, because the economics that helped the success story of GCC will not apply.