[amelius]

Everybody who has programmed in VHDL or Verilog knows that building hardware is very close to writing software actually. It's just a level of abstraction lower, and there is a lot more parallelism, but the concepts are very similar.

[deepnotderp]

Hahahaha, No.

Synthesizing ASICs and FPGA designs from Verilog/VHDL/insertnewhighlevellanguagehere may be close to software, but I guarantee you that creating high end production chips with such strict efficiency constraints guarantees that you need to do heavy simulations, and most importantly, has massive verification (it is 10/7nm after all....) efforts.

[amelius]

Ok, let me rephrase it as: it is like writing software with real-time constraints.

[Cyph0n]

Writing HDL is quite similar to software, but the "stack" you deal with is entirely different. It's like saying that writing embedded C is similar to front-end JS (hardware interrupts vs. events, external world vs. DOM, input voltage vs. user input, etc.).

[DigitalJack]

It's more like the difference between writing C and writing a cookbook. As in a kitchen cookbook.

[Cyph0n]

Especially if your goal is efficient, synthesizable HDL!

[engi_nerd]

I have described hardware in VHDL, and I've written a fair bit of code, and those processes are not similar at all.