[aseipp]

The HLS tools from Xilinx and Intel (and maybe Cadence I guess) can also actually compile your models as ordinary C++ code (i++ from Intel is literally just a fork of Clang, I think, and so are tools like LegUp), leading to their greatest benefit: simulations are way, way faster and software compilers have vastly better iteration times than synthesizers.

They seem to have a simulation framework for these tools that isn't just "re-use an existing simulator", and it apparently does use LLVM for codegen but that's the easy part. Actual simulation performance numbers would be really interesting to see vs actual RTL sims.