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originally posted by slacker@Oct 29 2006, 01:52 AM
coming from the asic world, originally, i think it's super-cheap. besides which, the trend (for both altera and xilinx) is to provide as much of their dev. tools for free as is possible. or, are you referring to a cost other than dollars/cents? --- Quote End ---
Coming from the embedded software development world, Quartus is amazingly difficult to use, expensive, buggy, and an all-around PITA.
For example, there's one place in the eCos tools that Altera supplies where the IDE calls a bash shell script that calls a config utility that calls a CDL script that calls a bash shell script to dynamically generage a Perl script which calls a Java program which reads a bunch of template files which generates a CDL script which reads a config file to generate a .h file.
That's quite simply insane.
Expecting people to buy/install Quartus so they can write and test software using open source tools and open source RTOSes is deluded. The icing on the cake is that once you have Quartus installed it's very frgile and makes building software several orders of magnitude _more_difficult_. On top of that, everybody I know has had endless problems with the Quartus tools, and wanted nothing more than to ditch Quartus and its "IDE" and use the same development methods they use for other CPUs.
Altera is nuts if they think they're doing themselves or their customers a favor by dictating to software developments that they have to buy Quartus and use some broken, overly complicated IDE that wastes huge amounts of development time.
I work on eCos, uC/OS-II, and Linux stuff using Gnu tools for a half-dozen different platforms. I'm not going to abandon all my tools and skills and switch to that awful Quartus IDE just for one platform.
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