As someone with breaking into the hardware space with a software background, I've acquired a newfound appreciation for the amount of work that gets poured into

As someone with breaking into the hardware space with a software background, I've acquired a newfound appreciation for the amount of work that gets poured into GCC/LLVM toolchains. Open implementations which acquire enough traction become open standards. I'm doing block-level CPU simulation work for my dissertation, and there's pretty much a wall of abstraction where my work has to stop before it explodes with licensing + compatibility landmines. A rock solid tooling ecosystem I could target for FPGAs and then eventual fabrication would be the dream.