Comment by delifue
2 days ago
Modern large productivity software (including IDE) are often "fragile".
Sometimes some configuration is wrong and it behave wrongly but you don't know which configuration.
Sometimes it relies on another software installed on system and if you installed the incompatible version it malfunctions without telling you incompatibility.
Sometimes the IDE itself has random bugs.
A lot of time is spent workarounding IDE issues
Building for an fpga shouldn’t be any harder than building for cortex mcus, and there are lots of free/oss toolchains and configurations for those.
Compiling RTL to run on an FPGA is way more complicated than compiling code to run on a CPU. Typically it has to meet timing, which requires detailed knowledge of logic placement. I'm not saying that's impossible, just that it's more complicated.
> shouldn’t
Is doing so much heavy lifting here, I need to ask; how much FPGA configuration you have done before?
Very little, just student projects in undergrad.
So yes, in that sense I'm talking out of my ass. But perhaps you can help enlighten me what it is that makes building FPGA firmware different from building MCU firmware.