[manigandham]

I highly recommend watching this, it's one of the best videos available on how chips are actually built and gives a great overview:

"Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

[bumholio]

It's just incredible how complex and advanced the hardware got, but at the same time, how crappy and inefficient the software on top of it is. I know it's simple economics and the chip foundry has an economy of scale that the Electron developer lacks. But it still feels like we're all eating garbage out of golden plates.

By the end of the next decade we will probably reach the end of what is physically possible in device fabrication, so competition will have to move to design and software efficiency.

[brian-armstrong]

I thought at first you were going to talk about how EDA software sucks. Now /that's/ garbage

[bumholio]

It's a good example of the same underlying economic incentives. An EDA title is used by a few tens of thousands of professionals, at best. Large investments into making it more user-friendly and stable is not really worth it in the grand scheme of things. It needs to be just the minimal viable product that can get the chip out the door; it will be complex and feature packed rather than usable, and the engineers will learn to navigate around it's idiosyncrasies and bugs just like they solve other technical problems, it's what engineers do.

The chip itself though, that's a whole nother thing. Especially the process that works across multiple designs and becomes an asset for the company. Any nanosecond shaved here improves the capacity of the foundry to compete and helps a billion people complete the task 1% faster or have 1% more memory. The customers have no reason to work around a less performing product, they will just buy from the competition.

So you get this strange combo of supernatural hardware assembled with atomic precision by garbage software written in Perl by an outsourcing guy with 6 months total programming experience.

[vgy7ujm]

What does Perl has to do with this? Wouldn’t be any better if the same guy wrote it in crap Python now would it?

[sanxiyn]

By the way, the lingua franca of EDA is Tcl.

[bigcostooge]

Improvements in efficiency may only be needed in build and runtime systems. You may still be able to write electron apps.

[ants_a]

That presumes the existence of a Sufficiently Smart Compiler.