[rcxdude]

The level of quirkiness and bugginess in the tools is on another level to most software tools. You shouldn't need access to the engineers who built it in order to make it work, this basically increases costs and barrier to entry massively.

[ip26]

Many of the tools are bleeding edge, developing new features to support a new process node at the same time as the new process node is being developed.

[gchadwick]

Certainly on the simulator/synthesis side you can still encounter straight-forward bugs in SystemVerilog features that were standardized over a decade ago (or find they're not implemented at all) or even simple parsing bugs (the kinds of bugs that would be trivial to find with some decent randomised testing of the parser).

Things being bleeding edge and fast evolving in certainly true for some EDA tools or parts of them but there's lots of more bread and butter stuff that never feels quite right.

[rcxdude]

This doesn't seem relevant to most of the tooling, which is not bleeding edge, and should be mature.

[jfkebwjsbx]

That is no excuse. A lot of software out there is bleeding edge, yet costumers do not tolerate crashes.

[api]

Sure, that's why important software never crashes. /sarcasm

[jfkebwjsbx]

And... it does not. Most crashes in actually important software are due to hardware/memory errors, rather than the software itself.

Of course, I hope you are not referring to Windows or any day-to-day software by "important".

[coribuci]

> The level of quirkiness and bugginess in the tools is on another level to most software tools. You shouldn't need access to the engineers who built it in order to make it work, this basically increases costs and barrier to entry massively.

I do not know what SW tools are you using but i'm still looking forward for a SW tool that doesn"t suck.

[rcxdude]

Oh yeah, software tooling also sucks, I'm just saying it's on average still better than the best of any hardware tooling I've ever had to use.

[user5994461]

I believe software developers are split between IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio and VS Code. They do work very well compared to what I've seen in the embedded world.

Ignoring text editors here, because text editors are not programming environments (no debugger, no compiler, no source control, etc...)