I wasn't sure how seriously to take Chisel until I saw the RISC-V BOOM definition https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom. It's clean, succinct, and I think Chisel is quite viable.
It's also a testament to the symbolic nature of Scala. It holds together pretty well in JVM, ScalaJS, Chisel, and scala-native. Scala as a language is remarkably simple at the core, which Odersky does a good job of showing in his book, even though there are a lot of library features on top that make it complex and a more difficult language in general use. In this way of having a cute core, it is very unlike C++.