[mumblingdrunk]

This is just true for a whole lot of the industry tooling. Xilinx Vivado is a bloated piece of crap that'll crash all the time unless you have half a terabyte of RAM. Same goes for lots of other EE-tooling in general. The L and B in MATLAB stand for Legacy and Bloat. People still write programs for PLCs in Ladder, where programs still cannot be portable between vendors, or even different products from the same vendor.

All the companies that produce anything invent their own language for the thing and write their own compiler for it. These compilers are clearly not written by compiler experts.

I don't blame EEs for building bad software. They weren't trained to do it and aren't paid to do it. I blame the "if it works, it works" culture that the industry seems to have. Never go back to refine anything, just keep pushing more plugins, more software; create a patchwork of programs until you get the job done.

[oscillonoscope]

Having lived on both sides of the fence, I feel comfortable blaming the EEs. Many are allergic to basic scripting, don't bother to learn how their tools work, and have an elitist attitude towards other design responsibilities (ex. layout, verification).

P.S Set up Vivado in scripted mode with either an in-memory project or non-project mode. It works like a champ.

[mumblingdrunk]

> Many are allergic to basic scripting, don't bother to learn how their tools work, and have an elitist attitude towards other design responsibilities (ex. layout, verification).

In my very limited experience, most people don't learn new stuff until they're forced to; either by their employer, by their university, or by needing to learn it for something they want to accomplish. This is why you'll have self-taught developers go for years using strings as enums, linear-searching in huge sorted arrays, because it works and why would you seek out something else? I think the solution is to introduce more software development in EE education; forcibly expose them to it. My EE bachelor's degree contained a whopping ONE class that was focused entirely on Python programming. The rest just used cobbled-together C code for microcontrollers, or arcane languages with dumb IDEs for PLCs.

I'll take your hint on Vivado, thanks!

[sweetjuly]

> Set up Vivado in scripted mode

The tried and true :) It's funny seeing people complain about Vivado bugs when I haven't run into any in years. Sure, the IDE may be absolute garbage, but I've thankfully never run into any bugs in the actual synthesis and routing parts of the package, which is all that really matters.

[sentinalien]

It isn't EEs building the likes of Vivado, they hire software engineers to do that stuff