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Comment by _mouvantsillage

Now I think I understand what you mean.

For many hardware engineers, I think that the message-passing semantics is a conceptual framework for explaining how simulators work. It is considered as a "necessary evil" that must be taken into account when writing HDL code.

When I write VHDL, I don't think in terms of communicating processes. I think in terms of combinational and sequential circuits that I describe with processes. The description is written in a way that makes the synthesizer generate the hardware that I had in mind.

I see a possible explanation for this mindset: since only a subset of VHDL or Verilog is actually synthesizable, we cannot rely only on the language semantics to write code that will map to functional hardware.

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