Why hardware designers should switch to Eclipse

P

Philippe

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-eclipse
I'd be interested to know what you guys think.

kind regards

Philippe Faes
Founding CEO Sigasi
http://www.sigasi.com
 
G

General Schvantzkoph

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- eclipse
I'd be interested to know what you guys think.

kind regards

Philippe Faes
Founding CEO Sigasi
http://www.sigasi.com

Nothing beats Emacs
 
M

M. Norton

Nothing beats Emacs

On whole I agree with you, however let's be realistic, the learning
curve for Emacs is incredibly steep. For folks who are eyeball-deep
in VHDL code 100% of the time, learning Emacs pays off in dividends
that continue for years to come. However, not all engineers are in
positions where that payback will be as great or continuous. For
those, something like Sigasi might work pretty well.

I have done a little bit of work with Sigasi in the last week or so.
As IDE's go, it's pretty decent. It's far more code centric than most
IDE's I've used, and seems well put together. While I suspect I'm
faster with Emacs (and as such, some of the refactoring tools Sigasi
implements aren't as useful) I've been very interested in how someone
new would respond to the environment. It's a lot better than shoving
someone into the text editors in any of the vendor tools, and similar
products like HDL Designer have the siren call of the schematic
capture design which I think leads into bad design practices.

Anyhow, Sigasi does seem to be a good tool. I don't know if the price
point will make it successful -- another reason emacs is kind of
amazing is that it's entirely open source and free, but I wish the
developers the best of luck. I daresay it's a hard market to break
into. If we get into a position to be purchasing more tool licenses,
I'll definitely ask folks to evaluate it. I know I'd feel a lot
better about someone using that tool, rather than HDL Designer.
 
J

Jason Thibodeau

BLOOOAAAATTTEEEEDDDDD

Eclipse is painful to use for me. I'm a Vi guy.

Let the Vi/Emacs wars ensue :)
 
C

Charles Gardiner

Generally I use nedit and a whole bunch of perl scripts/java apps I've written
over the years. I'm not totally against eclipse. I use it with the Lattice mico32
environment for instance.

Regarding the Sigasi tool, the price on the website is 'within reason'. What's not
within reason, IMHO, is the licensing model. If I don't fork out every year it
will stop working. I would never even look at a tool that I can't get a perpetual
license for. If I develop a project with it then I want to be able to come back to
it again in five years if I have to regenerate the project from my archives.
 
E

Eric Smith

On whole I agree with you, however let's be realistic, the learning
curve for Emacs is incredibly steep.

A steep learning curve is a Good Thing. If it was shallow, it would
take you a very long time to learn it.
 
E

Eric Smith

Eclipse is slow even on fast machines. My most recent experience with
it is on a Phenom II X4 965BE machine (quad core 3.4 GHz), and it
still is noticeably sluggish.

Years ago, people used to criticize Emacs for being slow and a
resource hog. By today's standards, Emacs is lean and mean.
 
C

Chris Abele

I hate Eclipse too. But I don't like Emacs.
Gimme something simple, preferably Multi-Edit.

Wow! That's a blast from the past - I used Multi-Edit for years and
loved it.
 
R

rickman

A steep learning curve is a Good Thing.  If it was shallow, it would
take you a very long time to learn it.

I didn't see a smiley at the end of that one... is it possible you are
serious?

Rick
 
K

Kim Enkovaara

Alan said:
I also found it seemed slow (probably because I was running it on a slow
machine): but I've never found vi or emacs feel slow.

You can't find fast enough machine to make eclipse fast. It is always
slow.

--Kim
 
P

Petter Gustad

Alan Fitch said:
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.

Petter
 
P

Philippe

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.

Dear Petter,

In Eclipse, you can check out a project in any location at all, and
then point your Eclipse to that location.
While the conventional place to check out projects would be ${HOME}/
workspace/projectname, you can use any other location on your file
system.

kind regards

Philippe
 
P

Petter Gustad

Philippe said:
In Eclipse, you can check out a project in any location at all, and
then point your Eclipse to that location.
While the conventional place to check out projects would be ${HOME}/
workspace/projectname, you can use any other location on your file
system.

But it's not a relative pathname, is it? If you copy it or use it on a
system where the filesystem is mounted elsehere it will fail to find
it.

Petter
 
H

Hendrik

Moving files around within your project is a no-brainer. Sigasi will
even update your Makefile if you wish.
And it is also no problem to move 'projects' around on your computer
(or network). You just have to point Eclipse to the new location.

Hendrik.
 
N

Nial Stewart

Generally I use nedit and a whole bunch of perl scripts/java apps I've written
over the years. I'm not totally against eclipse. I use it with the Lattice mico32
environment for instance.

Similary, I use Textpad with perl scripts and a lot of tool customisation.

Regarding the Sigasi tool, the price on the website is 'within reason'. What's not
within reason, IMHO, is the licensing model. If I don't fork out every year it
will stop working. I would never even look at a tool that I can't get a perpetual
license for. If I develop a project with it then I want to be able to come back to
it again in five years if I have to regenerate the project from my archives.

I started looking at Sigasi but stopped experimenting when I found out the price/
licensing model.


Nial
 
P

Petter Gustad

Hendrik said:
(or network). You just have to point Eclipse to the new location.

That's one of the things I don't like: absolute pathnames.

In my typical makefile based environment I don't have to change
anything to point to the new location if I should switch back and
forth between computers where the directory is mounted at different
mount points since the paths are all relative.


Pettr
 
M

Marcus Harnisch

Philippe said:
In Eclipse, you can check out a project in any location at all, and
then point your Eclipse to that location.

Problem is that in Eclipse you don't seem to be able to specify
*project relative* paths for resources (aka project files), except via
user variables which is annoying. All paths are either absolute or
relative to the workspace.

As for the speed, once started up, Eclipse/Win32 runs with decent
performance fast even on my old laptop. Even closing it an restarting
is not too bad. The startup delay is due to the JavaVM I suppose.

I know (former) passionate Eclipse haters who have just switched due
to the impressive speed improvements in recent versions.

Disclaimer: I use Eclipse for certain C development only, so my
opinion might be impacted by behaviour specific to ARM Embedded
Workbench/CDT plugin features.

Regards
Marcus
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
473,743
Messages
2,569,478
Members
44,898
Latest member
BlairH7607

Latest Threads

Top