Rhii Alexander 🏳️⚧️crashtestdev@woof.tech
Nov 9, 2026, 10:46 PMDoes anyone recommend an FPGA whose toolchain isn't a massive horrific kludge?
yes, this is now my sole requirement
Replies
Nov 9, 2026, 10:54 PM@crashtestdev I have heard that Gowin (Tang Nano) is worth a look?
- Rhii Alexander 🏳️⚧️crashtestdev@woof.techNov 10, 2026, 1:44 AM
@ret I have been aware of the Tang nano and had a 20k for some years now, however not only does the toolchain fail at my sole requirement, it fails so hard I have successfully wire-wrapped every project I was intending to use it for using discrete logic gates before I was ever able to get the toolchain to work, which as of yet I have never been able to even install correctly Across Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Windows, and macOS
Minimini_ninja_64@chaos.socialNov 9, 2026, 11:39 PM@crashtestdev ice40 but p much anything decently supported by nextpnr has gud toolchaining imo
its much easier to get to grips with than vendor tooling in my experience
- Rhii Alexander 🏳️⚧️crashtestdev@woof.techNov 10, 2026, 2:16 AM
@mini_ninja_64 I managed to get nextpnr and yosys to install on a VM once, but it seems I have lost/deleted the image annoyingly, even then I wasn't able to run the example without it breaking
Maybe I'm asking too much but I'd kill for a small handful of self contained binaries that I can just install or build from source without having to link to some massively out of date library with more bugs and CVEs than there are transistors on the system I am building it on
I am just sick to death of whenever I start a new embedded or low level project which isn't in Rust, I spend hours to days fixing library dependency issues; to get to a point where it finally runs and... oh no it's actually full of bugs. Meanwhile all my experiences in Rust, even on unstable tier-3 supported architectures, has been that shit just works, so I just don't fucking understand why toolings which predate the Rust programming language itself are more broken just... urghhhhhh
- Minimini_ninja_64@chaos.socialNov 10, 2026, 3:14 AM
@crashtestdev yeaa thats fair tbh it deffo a big of a step down from rust embedded toolchains in genral, well except for spade lang which has the best tooling ive used in fpga space (if ur willing to not use verilog etc) but with rust preference it would probs be a good fit for u, it has a tool like cargo called swim to manage everyhting
```
cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/spade-lang/swim
swim install-tools
swim init --list-boards
```it has what u would expect like swim test, swim upload etc..