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I understand how you feel, but if EDA had settled on Python, many of the same things we see would still be prevalent. They would be slightly reduced due to Pyth

I understand how you feel, but if EDA had settled on Python, many of the same things we see would still be prevalent. They would be slightly reduced due to Python being a slightly less dynamic language than TCL but I am not sure it would matter. The problem with EDA automation software is that it has been historically written by people with low skill in software development. Their domain of expertise is hardware. These shops also have not had for the most part a cohesive culture that spanned projects. For an org that focuses on digital design, the other 80% of that task is verification, but this has been prone to outsourcing and has had more churn on project to project. I could be wrong, as I am outsider in this industry but this is what I see from my interaction with the EDA space. It puts up with horrible bugs, tools are hard to compose, the installers are crufty and target ancient OS versions. The secrecy within in the industry itself has made it a very late participant in open source. So much conspires against any language that EDA would adopt.

IshKebab 2y ago
I dunno I think the actual EDA tools are pretty good (I've used VCS and Questa mostly). Bugs are quite rare, the GUIs are pretty sophisticated and surprisingly usable given how niche software it is. They're even starting to support recent OSes (though you have to use the lowest common denominator so we're still on RHEL 8). I think they mainly just don't really care about improving the scripting interfaces. TCL is an industry standard at this point and it is a shit language but it's not the main thing you're doing. In my experience it's really the customers have low skill in software, so they won't even be asking for anything better than TCL. Hacky Bash scripts are the standard here so if anything TCL is an upgrade. This is an industry where CI is a novelty. I still have to deal with people who think CI should be a very quick sanity check and the testing should mainly be manual.

IshKebab 2y ago

I dunno I think the actual EDA tools are pretty good (I've used VCS and Questa mostly). Bugs are quite rare, the GUIs are pretty sophisticated and surprisingly usable given how niche software it is. They're even starting to support recent OSes (though you have to use the lowest common denominator so we're still on RHEL 8). I think they mainly just don't really care about improving the scripting interfaces. TCL is an industry standard at this point and it is a shit language but it's not the main thing you're doing. In my experience it's really the customers have low skill in software, so they won't even be asking for anything better than TCL. Hacky Bash scripts are the standard here so if anything TCL is an upgrade. This is an industry where CI is a novelty. I still have to deal with people who think CI should be a very quick sanity check and the testing should mainly be manual.