Programming Lattice FPGAs on a Mac?

[NorthGuy]

Sorry but this is not a teenagers' beauty contest. When it comes to professional workstations there is no such thing as "preference" - you buy what you need to get the job done - whether it's Linux machine, Windows or whatever else.

This exactly the attitude which brought us into this world of over-bloated and buggy software. People are willing to accept any crap they're given. And the more they're accepting, the crappier it gets.

I have MacBook Pro and it is miles ahead of Win10. At the very least it's still Ok, while Win10 is beyond acceptable. If Vivado could run on Mac, I would've bought a big-screen Mac already.

[asmi]

I have MacBook Pro and it is miles ahead of Win10. At the very least it's still Ok, while Win10 is beyond acceptable. If Vivado could run on Mac, I would've bought a big-screen Mac already.

Modern MacBook Pro is the worst piece of crap I ever touched in my life! Surface Book 2 is eons ahead of it in just about any metric. Only mindless iSheeps think otherwise.

[ataradov]

Can you tell me more about this? It's interesting!

I'm not sure about the details. I have never used it this way. But I know people setting them up for speed. Apparently things work (or worked some time ago) faster on Linux in multi-processor configuration.

[Bassman59]

Xilinx, Altera and Lattice use Qt already. The bigger problem is supporting all the hardware debuggers and programmers.

This shouldn't be a problem at all -- Silicon Labs' USB programming dongles all work on all three platforms. Segger provides drivers for all three platforms and I used the GNU-Eclipse-GCC-whatever setup on my Mac for an Atmel SAM project, and the debugger/programmer worked flawlessly. I think NXP's stuff was all cross-platform, too, but I have not kept up with it.

And at least for Xilinx Linux (or UNIX, I guess) support was there first or at least from early on. Since some of the tools in ISE are still using Tk.

Xilinx supported high-$$$ Unixes like HP-UX and IBM's flavor from basically the beginning (I remember X Windowing into a Unix server from an NT box in 1996). It took them forever to support Linux, and as I remember they finally came on board with Linux in 1999 or 2000. And now I remember them supporting Solaris; at one job we had Solaris servers that we'd use for the big runs.

[aandrew]

The bigger problem is supporting all the hardware debuggers and programmers.

This is actually a non-issue. Libusb is cross platform (Windows, OSX and Linux) and works with pretty much every single programmer out there. I've personally written code for the FX2LP and FX3 devices, the latter of which I was able to stream 2.5Gbps for hours without error. Rebuild and it works on Linux.  I didn't have a need for Windows but it should have worked there, although as with all things Microsoft, you needed to pepper the Makefile with some MS-specific garbage.