Five reasons why we built EDA tools on Eclipse

Somebody asked me why we had build our Sigasi VHDL plugin on top of Eclipse. There are several reasons. Here are five of them.

1. Familiar environment for software developers

If you have been developing some serious software, you’re probably used to the look and feel of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Even the embedded software market is shifting towards Eclipse. Both Intel  and Xilinx  have an embedded software kit based on Eclipse.

2. Translation for the basic infrastructure is provided

Hardly any EDA software comes in languages other than English. But when you are using Sigasi, most of the text on your screen is provided by Eclipse, not by Sigasi. As a result, you can have 95% of the tool translated, just like that. And maybe we’ll provide Japanese translations some day.
[Installing translations for Eclipse]

3. Revision systems provided

All popular version control systems have an Eclipse plugin. This means that our customers can use their favorite SCM  with Sigasi, without any additional engineering effort on our part. We prefer building new stuff. Not rehashing yet another GUI interface for Subversion 

4. Update mechanism

Keeping software up to date can be a real pain. Eclipse makes this pretty easy. [Update Sigasi ].

5. Feature rich editor

Can we have Keyboard Shortcuts for duplicating a line of code? And for moving a line of code up or down? How about search and replace , based on regular expressions? And Block Selection for VHDL Code Editing? Did I mention we want Line numbers and Side-by-side diff? And multi-byte characters?

Yes. You can have all of that and much more.

Imagine how much engineering effort it would have taken to build all of these features from scratch. Because we have built our tool on the solid Eclipse foundation, we can offer our customers more value for money.