[rsynnott]

I mean, this sounds a lot like software 20 years ago.

You can still get proper support for, say, IntelliJ if you want it, but tools and ecosystem have improved so much that it’s just not as important as it used to be.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that hardware development is the same as software development. It’s not. It has different problems. But the tooling _does_ seem well behind.

[ardy42]

> You can still get proper support for, say, IntelliJ if you want it, but tools and ecosystem have improved so much that it’s just not as important as it used to be.

How many people are doing hardware verification work vs. cranking out webapps with IntelliJ?

JetBrains can invest a lot in software ergonomics because they're basically selling mass-market software. If you have sophisticated but niche software, your probably going to invest your engineering effort into the it's capability rather than its ergonomics.

[rsynnott]

I mean, to take one example of a company in the space: Xilinx has operating income of about 750mn per year. Jetbrains has operating income of about 80mn per year on revenues of 250mn.

Given that I’d suggest that the reason that Xilinx’s development products have such a poor user experience vs IntelliJ is NOT that Xilinx is impoverished, but rather that the market has extremely low expectations so they don’t feel the need to spend on fixing them.

This isn’t a problem unique to hardware-land; lots of verticals have incumbents who produce low quality products on large profits because, frankly, the competition is just as bad and there’s a high barrier to entry. I’m not sure what would fix this for hardware-land, though. Possibly more pressure from open source; that’s largely what did it for software development (though even before that, companies like Borland put more than the minimum effort in).

[tails4e]

Xilinx are not just writing software, they also must use R&D to develop the FPGA hardware, dev kits, IP, etc, so it's a very different scale to JetBrains' focus. Also in terms of Sofware, the really challenging aspects are under the hood, the place and route algorithms, the static timing engine, the system verilog simulator (which is itself a huge undertaking), the hardware debug cores, the HLS SW that compiles C to accelerated HW, then SDK for embedded processors, oh.. And of course... Finally the GUI/IDE. With all that's going on underneath, Vivado does a decent job of presenting it all in a logical way. I'm blown away that I can see a timing failure on any of a million nets and in a click cros probe it to a line of verilog.

As for open source, SystemVerilog is an open standard, yet can you show me an open source simulator that competes with the free one that comes with Vivado?

[user5994461]

On the one hand Vivado is not entirely terrible considering that it can get some work done, but on the other hand it's beyond me why it's lacking the most basic needs of software development.

Zero support for source control? SoC have no examples, why can't they systematically provide an hello world example (blink a LED) with their development boards? The IDE itself has close to zero doc and there is no help on the internet, it takes 3 freaking days for an experienced developer to figure out how to create a project.

[tails4e]

Theres a load of documentation, videos and examples, both on github maintained by xilinx as well as on xilinx.com. For example: https://www.xilinx.com/support/university.html and linked from there is a complete course in getting started with all materials, slides and docs : https://www.xilinx.com/support/university/vivado/vivado-work...