[duped]

I would argue that the prevalence of HDLs proves that DSLs are a good design for problem domains that scale in complexity. The alternative is point and click CAD, which has a ceiling on the scale of complexity you can reach.

> Honestly my sense is that it's just time to rip the bandaid off and generate synthesizable hardware from Python or Rust or whatnot. More syntax isn't what's needed.

People who think the problem is that they can't synthesize a program in hardware from something like Python completely misunderstand the purpose of an HDL. You do not write a program and press a button to get that program on hardware. You write a program to generate the design and verify its correctness. It is much less like writing an imperative or functional program and more like writing macros or code generation.

Now if you want to write a Python library for generating the underlying data for programming an FPGA or taping out circuits that's actually a good idea that people have tried out - the problem you run into though are network effects. Generating designs is easy, verifying and debugging them is very hard. All the money is in the tooling, and that tooling speaks HDLs.

[adwn]

> I would argue that the prevalence of HDLs proves that DSLs are a good design for problem domains that scale in complexity.

The major HDLs (i.e., Verilog/SystemVerilog and VHDL) are not DSLs in any meaningful sense of the word. There exist HDLs which actually are DSLs, but they're mostly used by hobbyist and aren't gaining any significant traction in the industry.

[duped]

HDLs are the textbook definition of a domain specific language (the domain being the description of hardware, either it's behavior or design or both).

[monocasa]

That's like saying that software languages are all DSLs, the domain being the description of von Neumann style software.

[ajross]

Lots of "DSLs" are general purpose Turing-complete environments. What distinguishes them is their specific features that target a particular usage, usually just limited to syntax that directly reflects the domain in question.

But my point upthread is that even though these are "general purpose", they're still extremely limited in Practical Expressive Power for Large Scale Development, simply by being weird things that most people don't learn.

Python and Rust and even C++ projects can draw on decades of community experience and best practices and tools and tutorials that tell you how to get stuff done in their environments (and importantly how not to do things).

Literally the smartest people in software are trying to help you write Python et. al... With e.g. SystemVerilog you're limited to whatever the yahoos at Synopsys thought was a good idea. It's not the same.

[adwn]

Okay, I grant that HDLs fall under the wider definition of "domain specific language". I was thinking of the narrower definition, which is apparently more precisely called "embedded DSL" – a language which is a specialization of a general purpose language, respectively embedded or defined within a GPL.

[ajross]

> more like writing macros or code generation

Tasks which are also best done by premier software development environments and not ad hoc copies of ideas from other areas.