\chapter[chap:context]{Context}
-Other FHDLs (short, Christiaan has details)
-Advantages of clash / why clash?
+ An obvious question that arises when starting any research is \quote{Hasn't
+ this been done before?} Using a functional language for describing hardware
+ is not a new idea at all. In fact, there has been research into functional
+ hardware description even before the conventional hardware description
+ languages were created. However, functional languages were not nearly as
+ advanced as they are now, and functional hardware description never really
+ got off.
+
+ Recently, there have been some renewed efforts, especially using the Haskell
+ language. Examples are Lava, ForSyde, ..., which are all a form of an
+ embedded domain specific language. Each of these have a slightly different
+ approach, but all of these do some trickery inside the Haskell language
+ itself, meaning you write a program that generates a hardware circuit,
+ instead of describing the circuit directly (either by running the haskell
+ code after compilation, or using Template Haskell to inspect parts of the
+ code you have written). This allows the full power of Haskell for generating
+ a circuit, but only it also creates severe limitations in the use of the
+ language (you can't use case statements in Lava, since they would be
+ executed only once during circuit generation) and extra notational overhead.
+
+TODO: Define (E)DSL
+TODO: References
+
+ Advantages over conventional HDLs
+ - More consise
+ - More expressive
+ - Easy to transform / optimize / etc.
+
+ Advantages over existing FHDLs
+ - More control
+ - Full Haskell available
+ - Concise notation
+
+ Disadvantages over existing FHDLs
+ - More work to implement advanced things
projects / matthijs / master-project / report.git / blobdiff