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0 pointsqppo6y ago0 comments

High level synthesis works perfectly fine, just not from C. HDLs have chugged along too, it's just the toolchains are ridiculously expensive and risky to change. That's why hardware tech stacks lag behind the state-of-the-art.

I share the skepticism of high level synthesis from C as being a bad motivation. The workflow is more like metaprogramming, and C is terrible at that.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

gpanders6y ago· 2 in thread

> High level synthesis works perfectly fine, just not from C

What other HLS languages have you used? I'm not aware of any apart from C (and a limited subset of C++).

nybble416y ago

Clash[1] is one HLS language which generates HDL from a large subset of Haskell. The language is Haskell, actually, but not every construct can be synthesized; e.g. recursive data types and FFI calls have no HDL equivalent. Clash hooks into the compiler (GHC) and generates HDL from the intermediate representation. You can also run the Haskell code directly to see the simulated output.

[1] https://clash-lang.org/

gpanders6y ago

That is very cool. Alas, most of the other hardware engineers I work with can hardly write C, let alone Haskell, so I very much doubt I'll ever be able to use this at my job. But I like to see that there is innovation in this space and that people are trying new things.

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