Spinal HDL and its Creator Charles Papon

Our favorite quotes and key takeaways from our interview with Charles Papon (Creator of SpinalHDL)

The Motivation

“Once there are ways to do things better, it really feels painful to keep using the old tools.” 

“My goal was initially to provide a proper replacement to VHDL and Verilog.”

“So for me, there was really no way to develop some code and keep it closed source, locked somewhere. It's not really part of my philosophy.”

The Prerequisites

“You have to be motivated, but also, you really need to have quite a bit of financial security.” 

“You need freedom, and to have that freedom, you need to have some money on the side.”

“That's the thing, it's a lot of luck. Being somewhere at the right time.”

Building and Developing an Open Source Tool

“SpinalHDL is really about capturing the full graph of the hardware you want, having some automatic checking done on it. And at the very end, generating the verilog as a net list.”

“I try to avoid developing features that I would not use, because if it's not in use, it's not tested, it's not stable.” 

“And the thing is, the more I was using Spinal, the more I was discovering and realizing new ways to use it, smarter ways to do things over time.” 

Supporting the Community Using your Tool

“You have to protect yourself from doing too much support, or else nothing will move forward.”

“Often we're underwater with all the priorities. It's a question of having the freedom, having the time.”