
Xilinx rolls out easier-to-use free FPGA programming tools - gballan
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/xilinx_vitis_fpga_launch/
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mips_avatar
I remember reading Bunny Huang's book "hacking the xbox" and feeling so
empowered to build projects with FGPAs. So I took two semesters of Verilog in
University. However I have never been able to translate that knowledge into
anything remotely useful.

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rowanG077
TBH proprietary tooling this is just not the way to go. The FPGA space needs
solution which works across FPGAs of different vendors.

Besides there are way better alternatives to VHDL and Verilog that I feel High
level synthesis is kind of dead.

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madez
Which better alternatives to VHDL and Verilog do you mean?

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rowanG077
Clash mainly. I have also heard amazing things about bluespec but I have never
used it myself.

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darsnack
I just took a look at clash. HDL describes state in a very real way. Trying to
represent stateful hardware using a functional language is just too
complicated. I hate these toy examples of “look how easy an FIR filter is.” An
FIR filter isn’t hard to write in Verilog to begin with. The real headache of
Verilog is generate statements and multidimensional array indexing. And both
of those problems are readily solved by System Verilog, System C, or any of
the myriad of Verilog generators.

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rowanG077
Your comment about clash and functional languages not handling state correctly
are shortsighted. I have implemented real systems using Clash. The usability
is simply leaps and bounds ahead of stuff like System Verilog and System C.
The real headache of Verilog and the like is that it has little ability to
abstract making you think that the real problem is stuff like multidimensional
array indexing.

I'm not sure what you expect on a front page of a technology they have to show
really simple toy examples and can't really dive in deeper. It's a front
page... You can find myriad of more involved stuff if you would have googled
for 5 seconds. For instance this [https://clash-lang.org/blog/0001-matrix-
multiplication/](https://clash-lang.org/blog/0001-matrix-multiplication/).

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darsnack
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to put down Clash. I disagree with your
statement about it being an alternative to Verilog or VHDL. It’s like saying
Java is dead because Scala exists.

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rowanG077
Java and Scala are at about the same level of what you can do with both. Clash
isn't really at the same level as VHDL or Verilog. You are right that it still
compiles down to VHDL or Verilog but that doesn't mean anything. Haskell also
compiles down to machine code. Does that mean you might as well write machine
code? Of course not.

What's your point that there are other languages that compile down to Verilog?
I have tried some of them and most of them try to shoehorn a software language
into digital design which doesn't fit.

