I come from a sofware world not typical for HN. I am a (very) low level software and FPGA guy. Despite my best efforts, I don't understand: What do any of these tools do that Make does not? Are they faster and easier to use? Do they work better?
I don’t about these new build tools, but I’ve usually found ninja to be faster than make in most situations at least. Also curious to know, is there no work done in the realm of developer productivity inside the FPGA world?
No unfortunately. The FPGA "build" realm is mostly a clusterfuck of proprietary tooling. It all has poor to nonexistent integration with, well, anything else. There are some things that are okay for simulation like Cocotb, but for actually building hardware FPGA designs, you are locked into the vendor's tools. The only exception is if you use a small, slow, and outdated FPGA, not suitable for large designs used in industry. For these reasons, there isn't much of an open source community making things like Please and Bazel specific to FPGAs. You can set it up yourself, but a packaged product that just works out of the box doesn't exist to my knowledge.