Comment by malmeloo
2 days ago
Ha yeah, I agree the website isn't great. I set it up a while ago just so we have something to fill up the void. Right now it's just me and a professor of previously mentioned course who are actively involved in the project, so we've been mostly focused on the technical part.
That said, functionally speaking the extension is 90% of the way there. Synthesis, PnR, simulation, visualization and more all work for ECP5 & iCE40 FPGAs, and to limited extent some others as well. We have a few more features that we're working on, but a very solid basis already exists.
For technical reasons we have a bit of a deadline on finishing the project, which is likely in around ~6-7 months. So by then we intend to have a 1.0 release and very solid documentation out.
> it's just me and a professor of previously mentioned course who are actively involved in the project
Unfortunately, past experiences I have are that a very small academic team = stay away, project will have too many rough edges.
I hope your experience goes better. Tip: A revenue stream gives you something to work with. Failing that, carefully document your whole architecture so contributors will be willing to help.
## Irrelevant Complaining
Just ran across this last year: good looking software, great concept, first half of features work great … enough to hook me, so when I finally found out the other half was bug ridden I stuck it out but ouch. Needless to say, no design document so even fixing stuff was a pain point.
I know exactly what you mean and I share your frustrations with academic software. In our case I think it helps that our main goal is to provide a good user experience: we're not reinventing toolchains from scratch, but rather making existing ones available in a user-friendly way. Especially in the past year or so I've spent a lot of effort on reducing tech debt, modernizing the underlying architecture and squashing bugs. We've gone through several UI iterations just to see what would be most intuitive. Compare that to most pieces of academic software that should technically work, but are so difficult to use that nobody except the developers really know how to utilize it.
Our intention has never been to build a full alternative to e.g. Quartus Prime or Vivado that suits everyone's needs. Our main intention is to show people that FPGA toolchains don't have to be so difficult to get started with, and that alternatives are possible. And yes, I agree, that absolutely means good documentation on several levels to allow other people to continue working on the project. Good thing that's part of our mission, so it will be done; just takes a little bit of time ;)
have u looked at the teroshdl extension?