Comment by amelius
2 days ago
I agree but I think that writing yet another IDE extension is not going to solve the problems. An IDE will bring you one step further away from the actual hardware, and makes it more difficult to solve unexpected problems. Also, not everybody likes IDEs, some just prefer Vim and the commandline. An IDE is not the magical solution here.
Instead of focusing on the IDE, maybe focus on a build system. Look at how PlatformIO does it.
I agree, this won't be for everyone. But if you're trying to learn how to use FPGAs, I think it helps a lot to have a tool like the one we're building. The learning process is also inherently very visual: it helps a lot to see what the individual steps look like, how Yosys synthesizes your Verilog code, where Nextpnr places the elements, what the chip looks like, what exactly your testbench is doing...
People who want to stick to the command line can always just use the tools directly. The extension tries to stay close to the tools by allowing users to directly modify the command line arguments and making invocations visible to the user. Heck, you could even use our standalone 'edacation' tool to run tasks defined in project config files (although admittedly I haven't tested that in a long time, so it might not really work that well)
Our intention has never been to build a one-size-fits-all solution. We want to show people that these fantastic OSS tools exist and can provide a viable alternative to Big FPGA's tools. We hope to be(come) a source of inspiration for what the scene could look like if we just let go of these massive toolchains that nobody really likes to use.