alt Hacker NewsModern large productivity software (including IDE) are often "fragile".
Sometimes some configuration is wrong and it behave wrongly but you don't know which configuration.
Sometimes it relies on another software installed on system and if you installed the incompatible version it malfunctions without telling you incompatibility.
Sometimes the IDE itself has random bugs.
A lot of time is spent workarounding IDE issues
Building for an fpga shouldn’t be any harder than building for cortex mcus, and there are lots of free/oss toolchains and configurations for those.