Verifying ARM processors against the official ARM specification

Re:Verifying ARM processors against the official ARM specifi... by bsder on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @03:46PM (#12175934)

However those abstractions rarely map to hardware well.

For example, I use hash maps and vectors for almost all of the adhoc data structures in my programs. Neither of these have a useful abstraction in hardware.

At that point, why am I using a modern programming language?

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Re:Verifying ARM processors against the official ARM specifi... by aninhumer on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @08:02PM (#12177443)

Again, those are software concepts. That's not what I'm talking about.

The point is, there are many hardware level constructions (FIFOs, BRAMs, CAMs, etc.) which can be very usefully abstracted.

And you use a software language to do it, simply because the hardware languages are so bad at it. There's no reason a HDL couldn't be good at expressing these abstractions (indeed Bluespec exists and does a fairly good job), but since they don't, using a programming language simply as a metalanguage is still better than actual HDLs.

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