I have to say it is very exciting how the open-tools are evolving to become more flexible with good APIs to interact with. I think this will become their biggest advantage, the ability to interact with a variety of extensions and the ability to integrate them tools into other software stacks.
A really interesting look under the covers of nextpnr, the speed of improvement of the FOSS tools is amazing.
I really wish I had time out of some very busy days to dig into FPGA designs, thanks Piotr for your work promoting the tools and bringing some nice hardware to the community.
Yeah totally! This definitely lowers the bar to entry using a popular scripting language like Python rather than the industry standard TCL. As far as I understand TCL is still supported, for backwards compatibility and interoperability with existing designs and infrastructure but it is not as capable as the Python API, and “not recommended for new designs”