Comment by tux3

FPGA dev is just much more painful and more expensive than software dev at every step.

That's in no small part because the industry & tools seem to be stuck decades in the past. They never had their "GCC moment". But there's also inherent complexity in working at a very low level, having to pay attention to all sorts of details all the time that can't easily be abstracted away.

There's the added constraint that FPGA code is also not portable without a lot of extra effort. You have to pick some specific FPGA you want to target, and it can be highly non-trivial to port it to a different one.

And if you do go through all that trouble, you find out that running your code on a cloud FPGAs turns out to be pretty damn expensive.

So in terms of perf per dollar invested, adding SIMD to your hot loop, or using a GPU as an accelerator may have a lower ceiling, but it's much much more bang for the buck and involves a whole lot less pain along the way.