Why hardware designers should switch to Eclipse
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From: whygee on 23 Mar 2010 16:02 Jason Thibodeau wrote: > BLOOOAAAATTTEEEEDDDDD oh yes, that too. > Eclipse is painful to use for me. I'm a Vi guy. > > Let the Vi/Emacs wars ensue :) anyone with me in favor of nano ? yg -- http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org
From: Patrick Maupin on 23 Mar 2010 17:12 On Mar 23, 1:45 pm, n...(a)puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote: > After getting used to the not so obvious layout and terms I understood > the underlying ideas which are really nifty. There's a term for that: "Stockholm Syndrome"
From: Nico Coesel on 24 Mar 2010 14:32 Patrick Maupin <pmaupin(a)gmail.com> wrote: >On Mar 23, 1:45=A0pm, n...(a)puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote: >> After getting used to the not so obvious layout and terms I understood >> the underlying ideas which are really nifty. > >There's a term for that: "Stockholm Syndrome" Ah, no well-founded remarks so I must be right. -- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico(a)nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
From: whygee on 24 Mar 2010 21:09 Nico Coesel wrote: > My experience is that people don't like change My experience is that people apreciate things that work and does not distract them from their work. Re-learning, re-configuring, re-mastering new tools all the time is what makes engineering a terrible job today. > and like to stay stuck > in old unproductive methods. If it works, it's productive. Then why would there be a thread on comp.arch.fpga about someone selling his own old tools ? > Sometimes you need to push people forward. yeah, obsolete their tools and force them to switch, renew the license and get some more cash from the cow. > Ofcourse you can do all this with a command line tools but it is way > less productive and more prone to errors than having everything > presented to you in a GUI. but you can't automate a GUI. where is my productivity when I have to spend minutes clicking on dialogs, on boxes and on "OK" buttons everytime I recompile my VHDL in Actel's Libero ??? oh, and because it's a rather complex piece of pieces of SW, I have to _wait_ for each tool to complete, before I am allowed to click on the next dialog for the next tool in the chain. > Bottom line is: I really wish Xilinx would drop ISE and move on to > Eclipse. ISE is a typical example of an IDE that is intended to get a > quick start but runs out of air very quickly. so you propose to replace it with another ... bloated interface ? Oh yest it's based on Java so it must be much better... yg -- http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org
From: Patrick Maupin on 24 Mar 2010 22:13
On Mar 24, 6:57 pm, n...(a)puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote: > My experience is that people don't like change and like to stay stuck > in old unproductive methods. Sometimes you need to push people > forward. My experience is that learning a new tool is only worthwhile if you are going to use it a LOT and gain a LOT from it. My experience is also that a cursory examination of a tool can usually give you a reasonable feel for whether this is going to happen or not. > Thats rubbish. Perhaps true for the simple IDEs intended to give > people a quick start. I don't like those either. See, those are the ONLY ones I like. > Eclipse is a whole other story though. It is designed to aid working > on complex projects. I have several projects that share a common code > base and some of those projects result in 10 to 20 slightly different > binaries. Eclipse helps me to organize such projects. A makefile > keeping all the defines and projects definitions apart would be a > nightmare. And that is besides the many aids Eclipse provides like > having a list of types, variables, defines and functions from a file, > showing call hierarchies, shading parts that are not getting compiled, > refactoring (renaming symbols), comparing versions from a version > control repository, etc, etc. No, the nightmare is finding the configuration button to set the project exactly right. IMHO, if you delegate the complex stuff to an engine like this, you lose control over it rather than gain control. And once again, I will refer you to Linux -- is your project really more complicated, with more options, than the kernel? Do you really think all the kernel hackers are Luddites? > Ofcourse you can do all this with a command line tools but it is way > less productive and more prone to errors than having everything > presented to you in a GUI. I never liked developing while peeking > through a key-hole. When I need to work on an software project I > always load the source into Eclipse because it allows me to examine > the structure of a piece of software very quickly. Where is this > function called from? Just open the call hierarchy. What is this > define? Just move over it with the mouse pointer. Where is the define > or symbol declared? Shift-click and you'll have the answer. Open a .h > file for examination by shift-clicking on it. You haven't described anything in this paragraph that can't be done with a decent modern editor. > Not to mention debugging. Its all there. And I forgot the best thing: > Eclipse works the same way for different languages. Writing and > debugging a C/C++ program works the same way as debugging a PHP > script. Eclipse is about learning one workflow and apply it to any > language. Ahh, THERE is a difference between editors and IDEs. Yes, debugging. Well, I write most of my software in Python and spend very little time debugging. Most of my Verilog tests are self-checking, and I sometimes look at waveforms, but very little else. I don't think I have personally set a breakpoint in about 15 years, since I used to have to write C/C++, so this is not very high on my priority list (and wasn't really that high back when I WAS writing C). But I do know a lot of people who start off writing really crappy software and then debug it into shape, and most of them DO swear by their IDEs. > > Bottom line is: I really wish Xilinx would drop ISE and move on to > Eclipse. ISE is a typical example of an IDE that is intended to get a > quick start but runs out of air very quickly. While I think ISE has a lot of room for improvement, I think it's really pretty good for what I want -- get a quick start, then copy the command lines over to a real, text-based, diffable, version controlled batch environment. Having said that, the primary reason I even use ISE for this task is because some of Xilinx's documentation really, REALLY sucks. For example, try to find documentation on using impact in batch mode to generate ACE files. It exists -- as an unorganized collection of HTML one-liners designed to be invoked as help files from within impact GUI mode. Of course, one probable reason for that is that somebody started to document how impact works in batch mode, and gave up because the software sucks so badly that you can't accurately describe its behavior without calling attention to just how bad it really is. Regards, Pat |