From your link: Vivado HL WebPACK™ Edition: no-cost, device-limited version of the Vivado HL Design Edition

It's not as simple as an upload to github. https://opensource.com/business/16/5/how-transition-product-...

The keywords are "device-limited". Xilinx WebPack won't build bitstreams for some of the larger and faster devices.

It is deprecated: it won't generate bitstreams for any new FPGA.

You're mixing up WebPack (which is a licensing plan for some of Xilinx's tools) and Xilinx ISE (which is one of those specific tools).

Xilinx ISE is indeed deprecated. There are quite a few parts in production which it will still generate bitstreams for, though.

Vivado is the newer replacement. It will not build designs for parts older than 7-series, though, so Xilinx ISE is still required to work with 6-series and older parts, as well as with Xilinx CPLDs.

WebPack licenses are not deprecated. The WebPack program is still active, and will generate limited licenses for both Xilinx ISE and Vivado.

You're right. I wasn't aware that the WebPack licensing program is for Vivado as well. Thanks for the clarification.

Most EE EDA/CAD tools are ancient monstrosities of patchwork with a user experience reminiscent of using eclipse 0.01. Full of bugs, lack of fast CLI tools. Everything must start a core process that takes many seconds to even boot. It's ridiculous. Software engineers don't know how good they have it in terms of tools.

I started off doing digital design but quickly switched to embedded software after seeing the state of tooling. It's not just the tools themselves either. There are folks who will vehemently defend the way things are and shoot down even the slightest improvement efforts as naïve. With that culture in place, I'm happy just having someone else slap a cortex-mX on a board and programming it with gcc/makefiles/openocd.

Being able to do that for embedded software is also a sign that things are changing. For the longest time embedded devices were only programmable from a vendor supported IDE (looking at you TI and Cypress). At least now the open source community have figured out how to get around the limitations and the tools are starting to flourish with increasing vendor support.