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Comment by beefok | Hacker News Reader

I feel you completely. The Vivado IDE/toolchain is absolutely atrocious and the designers should be shamed for the horrifying bloatware they push as the STANDARD. Sometimes I have better luck doing everything in tcl/commandline there.

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Vivado is amazing compared with the ASIC counterparts: Design compiler is for RTL synthesis only and you need years of experience to get any decent qor out of it. In ASIC land you have separate tools for every step, synthesis, STAs, PnR, simulation, floor planning, power analysis, etc. Vivado does all that in one seamless tool, and allows you to cross probe from a routed net right back to the RTL code it came from. Try doing that with ASIC tools. So to me it's a matter of perspective, once you understand how difficult the problem of hardware design is to solve, and what some of the existing de facto industry standard tools are like (for ASIC), you come to appreciate vivado for just how well it brings all of these complex facets together. Of course if you come from a SW background you make think vivado is terrible compared to VScode or some other IDE, but that's an unfair comparison. I guess to reframe the question - show me a hardware design environment that is better than Vivado. Also, I separate vivado fron the Xilixn SDK, as they are different tools, and Vivado is expclitly got the HW parts of the design

I added one small Verilog file to a Vivado project.

It froze the IDE for 45 minutes before I could do anything else.

This was on a beefy machine at AWS too, not some cheap home desktop thing.

That wasn't compiling, no synthesis, P&R, nothing.

There was no giant netlist I'd been working on either. Most of the FPGA was empty.

That was literally just adding a small source file which the IDE auto-indexed so you could browse the contents.

In Verilator, an open source Verilog simulator, that same source file loaded, completed its simulation and checked test results in less than a second. So it wasn't that hard to compile and expand its contents.

Vivado is excellent for some things. But the excellence is not uniform unfortunately. On that project, I had to do most of the Verilog development outside Vivado because it was vastly faster outside Only importing modules when they were pretty much ready to use and behaviorally validated.

That's definitely an anomaly, I use vivado with ASIC code reguarly, very large designs and have not seen anything like this. I use vivado to elaborate and a analyse code intended for ASIC use as its better than other ASIC tools for that purpose. Once I'm happy with it in vivado, then I push it through design compiler, etc. Elaborating a deign that is 4 hours in DC synthesis is about 3 mins in vivado elaboration.

FPGA vendors are in a tight spot, thanks to their customers. Their customers want better silicon, so they're forced to allocate their resources toward R&D, rather than making their software tools better. If you look at the Xilinx jobs page, you'll see maybe ONE job related to software tools programming, which is shocking given the complexity of Vivado/Vitis.

If some FPGA company comes along and throws out conventional market wisdom (the old Henry Ford quote seems pertinent: "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse"") and makes a FPGA with software tools that are fast, non-buggy, with good UI/UX, I think they would be able to steal significant market share. Early FPGA patents should be expiring by now...

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