Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing my point ;). You shouldn't be trying to think in imperative or functional programming because fundamentally FPGAs/HDL isn't programming.

You should be thinking in terms of state machines, pipelines, routing, delay & setup+hold constraints.

HDLs are just a high-powered blueprint languages. At the end of the day you're still just laying out physical blocks.

View on HN

And you missed mine, as I mentioned that we had electronic lectures.

I am not talking out of thin air and wild guesses how things should be, rather about my personal experience how we learned digital circuit design and how later, already with that skill, we applied the ideas to FP.

That was the goal of my initial comment, Hardware Design Ideas -> Help understating FP function combinations as if they were ICs, not how to design hardware from FP concepts.

Didn't miss it, just don't think they're equivalent. I appreciate functional programming and block diagrams/black box design are great tools for that space. However they don't capture the nuance of circuit design that goes into FPGA development.

You can't capture pipeline depth, SRAM usage, thermal envelope/clock gating that have significant real world impacts on your design.

I found this discussion interesting to read. It appears it's comp sci FPGA knowledge vs Electrical Engineering FPGA knowledge. Not so much knowledge but how to think about an FPGA as a whole.

Sate machines and pipelines are very much about programming though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com