Comment by juliangmp

> I once hoped things would improve when Xilinx launched the Zynq line, combining a processor with FPGA fabric. Instead, the accompanying tools were so unusable that they made things worse, pushing developers even further away.

I once tried to use Xilinx' Vitis (2025) to make a small-ish piece of software running on such a Zynq chip. After wrestling with it* for like 5 weeks, me and my colleagues decided to ditch the entire Xilinx suite entirely and just pick a compiler and make a bare-metal binary with it. The FPGA part is done by a separate team of course, so us traditional software devs can stick with decent tools. We actually opted for a Rust toolchain and I'm extremely glad we did this, despite the additional time it took.

I don't know how my FPGA colleagues work with the proprietary toolchains and not go insane.

*The IDE is effectively a wrapper with a custom python API around cmake and gcc. It's not very well written cmake and I also don't know how they configure the linker that it does the weird things it does.