Vivado is absolutely terrible, especially the GUI. Our toolchain at work is set up so that it can be entirely avoided, with developers only writing Verilog in their editor of choice, and calling make or pushing to Jenkins when they want results. And then they go home, as it takes a full day to build a product on our server farm. Sim/others is done with third-party products.
That's how most companies do it in my experience (and I prefer it as well). That said, Vivado is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (ISE). It may be horrible for HDL coding, but when you need to do timing analysis and floorplanning the GUI is really helpful and the integrated TCL command line makes it very flexible.
Tooling in FPGA-land is a sad story, unfortunately. It's stuck in the 90's. I've ranted enough times to feel I'm beating a dead horse, but it's frustrating to see how behind the times it is compared to software development. Just look at HDL IDEs as an example:
The vendor ones are worse than simple text editors, 3rd party IDEs cost an arm and a leg, while feature wise they are nowhere near their software counterparts. Take the most popular HDL IDEs (or should I say eclipse plugins?) and compare them with visual studio pro or jetbrains. The feature discrepancy is staggering (as is the price difference). We use Sigasi at work and while it's definitely better than a text editor, the basic version costs ~800$/yr and apart from error-checking, goto-definition and renaming there's not much else going on. For the same price you can get the whole jetbrains suite with a couple hundred dollars to spare.
Is it possible that the market for software developers is larger than the fpga developer market hence allowing tool development costs to be amortized over a larger set of users.
That's true, but that doesn't explain why the HDL IDEs lack modern productivity features or why the simulator GUIs have the same interface as 20 years ago. Inertia and vendor lock-in are better explanations IMHO.
I hope with FPGAs becoming more mainstream the open source/hobbyist community will step in and refine some things, but if the big EDA shops don't take hints from the software industry things are not going to change very fast.
Most software tools are provided for free, sometimes even open source. If money is involved, and we're not talking about things like IDA Pro, prices are usually negligible.
With Xilinx toolchains, you're paying both for extremely expensive toolchain licenses, and paying quite steep prices for the FPGA units themselves. We're basically shoveling money at Xilinx as fast as we can.
That's how most companies do it in my experience (and I prefer it as well). That said, Vivado is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (ISE). It may be horrible for HDL coding, but when you need to do timing analysis and floorplanning the GUI is really helpful and the integrated TCL command line makes it very flexible.
Tooling in FPGA-land is a sad story, unfortunately. It's stuck in the 90's. I've ranted enough times to feel I'm beating a dead horse, but it's frustrating to see how behind the times it is compared to software development. Just look at HDL IDEs as an example:
The vendor ones are worse than simple text editors, 3rd party IDEs cost an arm and a leg, while feature wise they are nowhere near their software counterparts. Take the most popular HDL IDEs (or should I say eclipse plugins?) and compare them with visual studio pro or jetbrains. The feature discrepancy is staggering (as is the price difference). We use Sigasi at work and while it's definitely better than a text editor, the basic version costs ~800$/yr and apart from error-checking, goto-definition and renaming there's not much else going on. For the same price you can get the whole jetbrains suite with a couple hundred dollars to spare.