YoWASP aims to distribute up-to-date FOSS FPGA tools compiled to WebAssembly | Hacker News Reader

YoWASP aims to distribute up-to-date FOSS FPGA tools compiled to WebAssembly

yowasp.org

32 pointsluu5 comments

I wish this had a website where I can use it from the browser.

You mean like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38771779

To the authors of this project: I would seriously consider a rename.

* WASP is already an established acronym: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/wasp

* If you ignore the acronym, wasps the insect are not a positive comparison (bees are useful but I don't know anyone who likes wasps)

* The acronym recursion is both awkward and confusing - the "P" stands for "PnR" (a term I am not immediately familiar with), and if I have to do this level of research to understand a project's name I'm skeptical about the quality of their other documentation and disinclined to spend much time digging deeper.

Addendum: I did attempt to understand what "PnR" is without success. That acronym is widely in use as "passenger name record". This does not seem to be the use in this project, but the project page does not elaborate or define it.

Anyone who knows that they want "fpga tools" knows that pnr means place & route in that context.

If the name were an arbitrary word which didn't attempt to define itself, would that be any better? I don't see why the name must mean anything specific, nor why you should expect the name to explain what the project is. That's what the documentation or other descriptive text is for. That the name gives some understanding at first glance is a bonus.

PnR is "place and route", and is a very common acronym in the ASIC/FPGA/VLSI space. It seems fair to expect those who'd use this specialized variant of Yosys to also be familiar with PnR. For reference, here's [1] Yosys's PnR tool, which expands the acronym in its README title.

Realistically, if you're using Yosys tools, you're going to need to have some familiarity with the underlying flows anyway; in my experience they're very powerful but also pretty DIY. That's not great, but it's the reality. That's just the nature of the space right now, given the alternative is a ~$1M single user license.

[1] https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr

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