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gsmecher 4 hours ago

I love that VHDL formalizes Verilog's pragmatic blundering, but emphasizing delta-cycle ordering is "inside baseball" and IMO bad marketing. VHDL's approach is conceptually clean, but from a practical perspective, this ordering doesn't (and shouldn't) matter.

Better to emphasize the type system, which make a durable and meaningful difference to users (both experienced and new). My go-to example is fixed-point arithmetic: for VHDL, this was an extension to the IEEE libraries, and didn't require a change to the underlying language (think of how c++'s std:: evolves somewhat separately from compilers). Verilog's type system is insufficiently expressive to add fixed-point types without changes to the language itself. This positions VHDL better for e.g. low-precision quantization for AI/ML.

In any case, the VHDL/Verilog language wars are over, and while VHDL "lost", it's clear the victory was partly Pyrrhic - RTL probably has a polyglot future, and everyone's waiting (with mixtures of resignation and hope, but very little held breath) for something better to come along.

oelang 2 hours ago | parent [-]

VHDL mostly lost the ASIC consumer market and for some that's the only market that matters, but the hardware design ecosystem is much bigger than that.

I wonder what AI will do to RTL/verification, the rigid nature of VHDL may be a better target for AI than Verilog.

gsmecher an hour ago | parent [-]

If AI does anything to the EDA space, I hope it helps break the chokehold the "big 3" have on tooling. Any startup that threatens their dominance gets acquired and disappeared.

I also hope this is coming anyway (see e.g.: KiCad nipping at Altium's heels, and Verilator's recent progress). There is just so much more to do, though...