> > >>And i'm always astonished when i talk with VLSI/FPGA guys, that
> > >>they can cope with the brokenness of their tools which are by far
> > >>worse than gcc, especially considering what Synplicity and Mentor
> > >>Graphics ask for their tools[1].
> > >
> > > What choice do they have? You do the best you can with the tools you
> > > have.
> > >
> > > Someone should write a FLOSS alternative. Unfortunately that is more than
> > > an easy Saturday afternoon project.
> >
> > More than that, wouldn't it require considerable reverse-engineering?
> >
> > My understanding from earlier conversations about this is that the
> > interface language used to program the FPGAs is proprietary and
> > undocumented, and that's the real reason there's no free software tools
> > for programming FPGAs.
>
> Undocumented and proprietary yes, but probably really not that hard to
> figure out. Writing a good synthesizer and dealing with the
> NP-complete problem that is P&R are what are difficult about this. I
> was talking with someone who had worked for Lattice, I think, who had
> some good ideas about how to go about this. Sadly, we're both too
> busy to work on it, and finding some people to do the coding for us
> isn't likely to happen.
The actual coding is 1% or less of the work.
The lion's share is
reverse engineering
design
testing
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