[zoltanlehoczky]

The transformation is surely a solvable problem given that various HLS tools, OpenCL for FPGAs and Hastlayer exist :). Whether it makes sense is another question and I don't pretend to have the definitive answer, though I believe it does: abstractions can increase productivity with trade-offs like the runtime efficiency of the implementation.

In this case I think in certain use-cases it has value to use the standard .NET parallel programming model and development workflow to get not an optimal but a good enough hardware implementation. The point is to get a performance and power efficiency increase, and with Hastlayer this is possible for certain algorithms with the fraction of the knowledge and time (i.e. cost) required to even begin being productive with HDL languages. Whether this is the best approach for a given task depends on its context.

We'll see, and in the meantime we keep working on experimental approaches like Hastlayer. Feedback like yours really helps, so thank you!