On 2014-01-02 09:15, Peter Corlett wrote:
My research into FPGAs so far has come up with the
following:
I am informed that Xilinx's FPGAs are better than Altera's, but Altera's
development tools are much better. Having actually *used* Altera's Quartus II
and found it to be pretty hateful, I dread to think how horrible Xilinx's tools
must be.
Talking about the xilinx side, it is sometime interesting what they
think, software should be ;-)
Verilog claims to be C-like, but this isn't
particularly true. Some of its
expression syntax is C-inspired, but you could describe it as Perl-like or
Java-like at that point! It's somewhat more Perl-like in that you can just glue
fragments together and it'll generally work. Even a rank amateur like myself
managed to get a blinking LED after barely twenty hours or so of effort :)
VHDL appears to be much more strongly-typed, which I
approve of as it means
code that actually compiles is much more likely to be correct, however a
beginner is going to find themselves utterly flummoxed because they're having
to learn circuit design and a rather picky language. I decided to leave
learning VHDL for the day when I embark upon a more ambitious project that
would benefit from a more rigorous design.
If you know what you're doing, you could be faster writing Verilog.
As soon as a project get's bigger, you probably appreciate it, that you
used VHDL, as it kept you from shooting yourself in the foot.
But then again, if you know what you're doing, you know how to structure
code, how to modularize right ...
So pretty much every flame war about programming languages applies here too.
Cheers