[orbifold]

It has a steep learning curve, but overall I think it forces you to adopt good development practices from the start. Since it generates C++ you can also easily wrap that code and expose it to python. That way you can use software tools instead of system verilog and can easily do integration testing with your software HAL. In practice our group uses commercial tools (synopsis, cadence) and DPI-C but for the most part this is because of the VHDL code we have. Vivado‘s build in simulator is way too slow.