On 02/10/2024 20:08, mruane--- via USRP-users wrote:
Hi Marcus!
Hahaha I thoroughly enjoyed the rant! I think you are correct
about Make and its variations. Indispensable seems an understatement
for something that is so pervasive in software development. As I
mentioned, I am primarily an FPGA developer. At some point, when the
Zynq and ZynqMP SoCs were released, the software community seemed to
(initially, at least) scatter when they saw "FPGA" in the name, and I
found myself inadvertently "volun-told" to be responsible for building
Linux releases with custom drivers for my hardware. :-) It was
horrifying! :-)
You don't see Make involved in FPGA builds as frequently as you'd
expect, considering the popularity of SoCs these days. As a
self-proclaimed "Crusty Old Hardware Guy", I'm not permitted to
actually say out loud that I think Make is a good addition to the FPGA
development flow... ;-) ...but I have to admit that I've been
pleasantly surprised by how easily all aspects of a build can be
automated, once the initial setup is done.
I think what keeps me from jumping in completely, is that many aspects
of FPGA development are still very much grounded in Hardware
Development principles and techniques, processes in which a GUI is
supremely helpful. At the end of the day, I still need to see a
schematic, block diagram, or wave-forms. To that end, however, with
the x410 UHD build, I was impressed by how straight-forward it was to
modify the Make files and build Tcl scripts to create the project,
build the IP, and open it in the GUI for me to inspect and continue in
my normal FPGA-dev flow.
Hahaha I tried to keep this short, but I apparently reply to rants
with...more ranting. :-)
Thanks for the reply!
Mike
I will observe that many of the doctrines which purely-software people
take for granted, like abstraction and modularity, tend
to be entirely-absent from the purely-hardware mindset. There's good
reasons for this. Software people want to abstract away
from the implementation details, wheres strictly hardware people,
just want to implement the details. FPGA "stuff" is in the
aetherial realm that exists between the two...
Make emerged from the necessities of managing modular software, which
necessarily meant a flotilla of source files, etc.
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