Free Tools?

Finally found the quote I was missing ... from olof's twitter feed (https://twitter.com/olofkindgren), "Closed source soft CPUs are the worst of two worlds. You have to worry about resource use and timing without being able to analyze it".

I also found my rant (https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/4472-rants-about-fpga-tool-chains/) comparing the way open source toolchain's are supported vs how vendor supported tool chains are supported. You can read about that here (https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/4472-rants-about-fpga-tool-chains/) if you would like. The post and replies were actually rather fair and balanced (IMHO).