[fpc-devel] Bounty for MIPS

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 2:51 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd
> <markMLl.fpc-devel at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
>> was tinkering with them, it would be interesting to have input from somebody
>> who's actually used that technology e.g. to tell us why a high-level
>> language such as Pascal can contribute.
> 
> If you cut features then Pascal can be just as low level as C.
> 
> In the specific case of FPGA I don't see why one would want to use
> Pascal because the hardware languages have a lot of specificities
> geared to hardware development and parallelity and 1 more important
> thing: Many hardware languages are very pascal-ish, so they are
> already similar to Pascal. VHDL for example is quite pascal-ish.
> 
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vhdl_signed_adder.png
> 
> So why modify Pascal to try to make it usable in FPGA when the main
> language for FPGA development is already pascalish?

Presumably for the same reasons that people are trying to translate C to 
FPGA functionality. NOT that I'm suggesting that as a viable project.

I think a lot of MIPS's viability rests with the Chinese. I'm obviously 
aware of Loongson etc., but it's very unclear just how many are bing 
shipped- they certainly seem to have stepped back from their threat that 
they were going to use it for a super.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]