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I don't understand why FPGA dev tools are so, so incredibly terrible. 100GB+ install size, hour-long compilation for trivial projects, random glitches you can o
by phendrenad2 4y ago
I don't understand why FPGA dev tools are so, so incredibly terrible. 100GB+ install size, hour-long compilation for trivial projects, random glitches you can only fix by restarting the IDE, other random glitches that corrupt your project files (hope you keep backups!), clunky slow GUI that randomly crashes to desktop, the requirement that you pay $x,xxx/year to use a $xxx dev board.
It was a fun hobby for awhile, but I gave up and left it behind.
- imtringued 4y agoThe huge installation size must be related to the size and quantity of FPGAs that are supported. It wouldn't surprise me if those 10 million LUT FPGAs end up bloating it up for the every day hobbyist. Some form of modularity would be welcome.
- phendrenad2 4y agoThey are modular. At least, last time I checked. You can pick and choose which FPGAs you want to support when you install the vendor's tools. But even if you remove support for all but one model of FPGA chip, it's still a very large install. And if you expand that to one entire FPGA family (maybe 100 or so chip models), that jumps it up by 50GB easily. So 500MB per FPGA model. And these models are highly similar within the same family, they just have different numbers of LUTs and layouts. My hopeful theory is that they're doing some kind of per-device precomputation that helps accelerate placing & routing. The theory I actually believe in is that they're just duplicating lots of data unnecessarily, and don't see any value prospect in fixing it.