[rhelz]

The "ecosystem" would just be, e.g. the suite of ASIC place and route tools, or FPGA synthesis tools, provided by each company. They pretty much all have TCL built in, for to help script them all together.

Each individual script is typically very ad-hoc, to address a specific shortcoming in a tool, or to get a particular mix-and-match of tools from various vendors integrated into a design pipeline.

That being said, it is an ancient and venerable tradition, dating back to the creation of tcl itself, and as long as we're making chip from Silicon it will be the duct tape holding it all together.