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exmadscientisttoday at 1:05 AM3 repliesview on HN

The main advantage to VHDL is the style of thinking it enforces. If you write your Verilog or SystemVerilog like it's VHDL, everything works great. If you write your VHDL like it's Verilog, you'll get piles of synthesis errors... and many of them will be real problems.

So if you learn VHDL first, you'll be on a solid footing.


Replies

blackguardxtoday at 1:53 AM

I think this can just be summarized to "write any HDL like you are modeling real hardware." Both VHDL and Systemverilog were primarily intended for validation and synthesis is a second class citizen.

pclmulqdqtoday at 2:32 AM

There is a trend among programmers to assume that everything supported by the syntax can be done. This is not even true in C++, but it's something people think. If you are writing synthesizable SystemVerilog, only a small subset of the language used in a particular set of ways works. You have to resist the urge to get too clever (in some ways, but in other ways you can get extremely clever with it).

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imtringuedtoday at 11:25 AM

I haven't learned Verilog, only VHDL and even that with the explicit <register>_ff <= <register_nxt> pattern when I need flips flops and I never felt like there is anything difficult about VHDL

Is the North American insistence on teaching Verilog what's setting up students for failure since Verilog looks a bit more like a sequential programming language at first glance?