Why hardware designers should switch to Eclipse
in [FPGA]
|
Prev: Confusion in address generation for MIG generated DDR2 interface
Next: Writing Hex values to file in VHDL?
From: Gabor on 23 Mar 2010 09:56 On Mar 22, 3:43 pm, Philippe <philippe.f...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have long been the primary > tool for software engineers. Like an airplane cockpit, an IDE is the > control center from which the engineer accesses all of the data and > tools that he needs. IDEs, and especially Eclipse, have proven to be > extensible, open, high quality platforms. > > However, until now, IDEs have not been popular in hardware development > circles. This is partly because many of the available IDEs for > hardware development have not lived up to the potential of IDEs that > is typical in the software world. Instead, IDEs tend to be overly > complex, closed, and they lock the customer in. > > Today, though, Eclipse is finally gaining traction among EDA > (electronic design automation) and FPGA companies. One such EDA > company, Sigasi, has just released the first commercial VHDL plugin > for Eclipse. Now, at last, hardware design teams can use Eclipse as a > basis for their own customized IDEs, based on the commercial and open- > source plugins that they need in their central cockpit for hardware > design. > > I've published a white paper on this subject.http://www.sigasi.com/content/why-hardware-designers-should-switch-ec... > I'd be interested to know what you guys think. > > kind regards > > Philippe Faes > Founding CEO Sigasihttp://www.sigasi.com Any plans to support the other half of hardware developers in the Verilog camp? Most of my projects are either all Verilog or mixed VHDL / Verilog. For just code entry I either use the chip-vendors brain-dead editor, which at least highlights known device primitive names so I don't need the Libraries Guide every time I instantiate them, or I use MED with my own language customizations. Regards, Gabor
From: Philippe on 23 Mar 2010 12:29 On Mar 23, 2:56 pm, Gabor <ga...(a)alacron.com> wrote: > Any plans to support the other half of hardware developers in > the Verilog camp? We do want to support Verilog and SystemVerilog in the future. However, for now we concentrate on VHDL. http://www.sigasi.com/faq/what-about-systemverilog-and-other-languages Philippe
From: Andy Peters on 23 Mar 2010 13:21 On Mar 22, 12:43 pm, Philippe <philippe.f...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have long been the primary > tool for software engineers. Like an airplane cockpit, an IDE is the > control center from which the engineer accesses all of the data and > tools that he needs. IDEs, and especially Eclipse, have proven to be > extensible, open, high quality platforms. > > However, until now, IDEs have not been popular in hardware development > circles. This is partly because many of the available IDEs for > hardware development have not lived up to the potential of IDEs that > is typical in the software world. Instead, IDEs tend to be overly > complex, closed, and they lock the customer in. > > Today, though, Eclipse is finally gaining traction among EDA > (electronic design automation) and FPGA companies. One such EDA > company, Sigasi, has just released the first commercial VHDL plugin > for Eclipse. Now, at last, hardware design teams can use Eclipse as a > basis for their own customized IDEs, based on the commercial and open- > source plugins that they need in their central cockpit for hardware > design. > > I've published a white paper on this subject.http://www.sigasi.com/content/why-hardware-designers-should-switch-ec... > I'd be interested to know what you guys think. > > kind regards > > Philippe Faes > Founding CEO Sigasihttp://www.sigasi.com I'm another long-term emacs user. Eclipse is the standard environment for the Xilinx SDK and I quickly discovered that I did not like it. It's slow, and completely non-obvious, and has a lot of hidden directories and files in the project directories and at least in the Xilinx-specific environment I had no idea which of those magic files were actually important to the build process and which were cruft. (And Xilinx didn't have a good answer.) You want a good IDE for C programming? Apple's Xcode. I am not kidding. But for VHDL, nothing beats emacs and Reto's vhdl-mode. And why should I pay to get something that doesn't do nearly what emacs/vhdl-mode does? -a
From: Nico Coesel on 23 Mar 2010 14:45 Philippe <philippe.faes(a)gmail.com> wrote: >Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have long been the primary >tool for software engineers. Like an airplane cockpit, an IDE is the >control center from which the engineer accesses all of the data and >tools that he needs. IDEs, and especially Eclipse, have proven to be >extensible, open, high quality platforms. I couldn't agree more. I have read the other responses but what I read there is: I don't know Eclipse and I don't want to learn. I used to be among those until I gave Eclipse a good try. After getting used to the not so obvious layout and terms I understood the underlying ideas which are really nifty. Nowadays I develop everything with Eclipse because it helps me to keep a good overview on my projects. -- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico(a)nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
From: Nico Coesel on 23 Mar 2010 14:49
Petter Gustad <newsmailcomp6(a)gustad.com> wrote: >Alan Fitch <apf(a)invalid.invalid> writes: > >> I find Eclipse baffling, though I wouldn't say I hate it. It seems to >> have weird jargon (what is a perspective?). > >Hi Alan, > >I've been using Makefiles and Emacs for many years. Using Eclipse I >have to search the hierarchy of perspectives, menus, tabs, etc. to >click a button in order to add -Os to CFLAGS for gcc! > >Also I don't like the concept of workspaces which are using files and >directories in a fixed place in the file system (even it it's your >home directory). I like to check out my design (being software or HDL) >from a revision control system anywhere and build it there, which >means using relative pathnames. Not true. Your can check out a project in any place and Eclipse will be perfectly happy since it will recreate the makefiles before building. -- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico(a)nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) -------------------------------------------------------------- |