Comment by checker659
2 days ago
> software developers generally aren't very good at doing things in parallel
If only hardware people would stop stereotyping. Also, do you guys not use use formal tools (BMC etc) now? Who do you think wrote those tools? Heck all the EDA stuff was designed by software people.
I just can't with the gatekeeping.
(Btw, this frustration isn't just pointed at you. I find this sentiment being parroted allover /r/FPGA on reddit and elsewhere. It's damn frustrating to say the least. Also, the worst thing is all the hardware folks only know C so they think all programming is imperative. VDHL is Ada for crying out loud.)
I was very specific in using the word generally. I taught a mixture of computer science and electronic engineering students. About three to four times more electronic students were competent for every computer science student over the years I taught.
It's not a case of just stating computer scientist weren't capable of doing it. They struggled with the parallelism and struggled with the optimisations and placements when you had to make physical connections on chips.
I'm well aware it's mostly going to be computer scientists writing the tools we use.
For those that want FPGAs to take off like the Arduino platform, I agree. I'd love it. However, it isn't the tooling that's holding it back. The reality is it is that cheaper, faster and easier solutions already exist. Why would you use an FPGA?
And their cited example was students. I think students would struggle at something new until they 'get it'. Would a software developer who does FPGA development professionally struggle more than, say, a hardware engineer?
Sure but most of software development is about running single-core workflows on top of a parallel environment so the experience of a SWE is very heavily single-threaded.
The ever so popular JS is explicitly singlely threaded.
The default way of programming is with code on individual lines and when you run a debugger you step from one line to the next. This is not how code actually runs within a pipelined CPU though.
> EDA stuff was designed by software people.
No - EDA software is built by hardware experts moonlighting as software engineers, which is partly why it is so obtuse.
I said "was", not "is". Also, I know how that's working out. Working with Vivado makes me want to barf.