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Comment by sklogic | Hacker News Reader

You need a synthesis tool - and there are open source alternatives. You need a cell library - a direct derivative of knowing a bitstream format. You need a place and route tool - as soon as format is known such tools would appear (as it happened with ice40). You need timing analysis, probably the hardest piece for community to produce without having an insider knowledge enjoyed by the vendors.

All this stuff, including the libraries, can be pretty compact. There is no justification whatsoever for the ISE and Vivado bloat. The essential tools should be very compact. There are multiple copies of a microblaze toolchain, for example. WTF? I need none exactly. Zero. Nil. Stop bundling all the crap, please! Put it in a separate package so everybody could happily ignore it.

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Many of the tools are command line. A few do require Gui to be useful. I absolutely agree that there is no need for the 8-10-20gb downloads that people endure to get this functionality. It's great to hear an experienced dev add to this discussion.

"There is no justification whatsoever for the ISE and Vivado bloat. The essential tools should be very compact. There are multiple copies of a microblaze toolchain, for example. WTF? "

That they were trying to include or support most of their devices or use cases in one distribution was my guess as to the reason for the bloat. Thanks for confirming it. I'll add that they'd do even better writing it in a LISP or ML-like language with macro's plus efficient compiler. The code would be readable, robust, efficient, and take no more space than necessary.

They already wrote all of their GUI in a nice and compact Tcl. Still such a bloat.

Cadence is using Lisp extensively, and their distributions are also not very small and are hard to maintain.

Didn't know about those lol... We already covered that the complex functionality and everything but the kitchen sink is reason for much of the bloat. With Cadence, it could be that plus legacy and/or coders that aren't good enough (or deadlines). Who knows.

I just think they could be several times smaller if they only included necessary functionality and added extra's repo-style depending on one's device, use-case, and so on. Btw, is Lisp used for extensions over there or the whole application? And which LISP?

They're using it for scripting, not for the core code, although there is a lot of Lisp code there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_SKILL

And, yes, it's about a time for the monolithic distros to die. People are already spoiled by package managers, there is no justification for 10gb downloads any more.

Oh, OK. That makes sense.

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