[prbs23]

From what I have seen of both the open source and commercial EDA software, I think it would take a well funded team somewhere around 4 years of development to catch up with the current state of the art. If we're talking about EDA emulation hardware, probably more like 6 years, since these usually have custom Basics designed for them.

Maybe you could cut a year off of those and still have something that is good enough but not state of the art.