this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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It is insane to me that something as conceptually basic as FPGAs can even be made proprietary at all, much less that being the universal state of them.
The world of FPGA is full of proprietary hardware and software blocks sadly. I haven’t dabbled since being a student but I remember finding it extremely jarring how on one hand you basically could write whatever hardware blocks you wanted (the freedom is comparable to learning programming all over again but in a fundamentally different way), but also you had super optimized “IP blocks” of software you can pull in like a paid library that you had to license. These blocks make the damn chip much more powerful for those of us not willing to write a fucking CPU, what the fuck do you mean DLC for the chip on my lab table?
Vivado was a bit of a pain but not too bad as far as proprietary software goes. There’s more steps involved than just burning a .hex to a regular microcontroller, the debugging is different, I get it, another program makes sense.
Personally I don’t write much code these days but I find myself yearning for like MS Visual Studio 2008. If I ever want to go back to programming on the side I will probably have to figure out my IDE situation from scratch. VS Community seems nice but there’s a lot of unnecessary features and of course Microslop’s grubby fingers all over it
VS Codium is an open source fork of VS Code.
Geany doesn't seem bad either but I haven't used it for much
There's insane maniacs who've written fucking CPUs in CSS, Minecraft, and Conway's game of life, among many other environments not intended for writing fucking CPUs.
Can't some insane maniac simply write a fucking CPU for FPGAs and release it as open source?
Plenty of insane maniacs have released lots of more useless stuff as open source, why not this?
(Using insane maniac as a compliment here; the world would be a much more boring and unenjoyable place without insane maniacs willing to waste their time making it a better or at least more interesting place.)
My fucking CPU comment was not that serious. The projects we were doing were just that. I have a notebook full of diagrams that I understand less and less every year.
It was just a bit shitty that the CPU part wasn’t included with the chip itself. IIRC the nicer ones had hardware CPUs/CPU cores anyway.
I meant it more as “hey I need to do this simple task, better write a processor real quick” which is not convenient. I’m almost certain there are dozens of FOSS RISC cores that could be burned to all of Xilinx’s FPGAs. It’s theoretically hardware agnostic but these are super popular parts.
The FPGA itself is just the chip. You can find them pre-installed in development boards though, but these are more expensive. But at least they might of a microprocessor if that's what you want.
And if you're fed up with Xilinx, check out Lattice semiconductors. They have a somewhat more open ecosystem
How is that different from purchasing any other software library?
I was a student and this was the first time I really felt like programmery things were paywalled. I think the licenses were per-deployment but free for education.
I think people who learned about programming in a previous generation may be more comfortable with things being very proprietary, and arguably the newest batches of people learning it in the slop era too. But until that point everything I touched had a free (as in beer) or free-ish equivalent. I remember the professor being very excited about the Chinese less closed down stuff, saying it didn’t matter that it was slower for a lot of applications.
Singularly fucking stupid IP gated moronicity. So much profit available before custom chips. Why?