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Comment by jgeada

This article starts out by assuming that understanding sequential programming is sufficient to understand hardware. Yes, Verilog is a simulation description language, and yes, it can be compiled to hardware. But it is a specific subset that translates to hardware, not the whole language. Large parts of Verilog/SystemVerilog exist to drive stimulus into the model hardware and to observe the results; those parts don't have any sensible mapping to hardware.

The problem with all these articles is that they start from wrong assumptions and keep going. In practice, industry has no problem using these languages to produce chips with billions of transistors that largely work the first time, with the expected performance and power. As others have mentioned, this industry is conservative, and if there isn't a problem to fix it will remain with the tried and tested.

(I'm one of the people named in the Verilog/SystemVerilog standards, worked with Phil Moorby and once upon a time was responsible for chunks of ncsim and vcs)

parent jgeada 4 years ago

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