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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Does this still use a custom hardware description language?

The curriculum here is very solid - my only critique is that it uses a custom HDL instead of Verilog, VHDL, or SystemVerilog.

It wouldn’t have been a huge stretch to do that, and make the skills taught that much more real as a result. Without the practical aspect of exposure to real HDLs, it seems more like a toy than a tool.

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I don't think there's anything to be gained by switching to VHDL or Verilog. Their custom HDL is a fine HDL for the uses of the course. There's so much commonality that they're effectively interchangeable syntactically. If the idea was to use VHDL or Verilog such that one could actually make the CPU on silicon or an FPGA, then that opens up a whole can of worms that is well beyond the scope of the course. I do think it would be awesome if they had a sequel that did this, but I think it doesn't make sense in the context of the existing course.

Knowing Verilog, I must disagree. Although it would be more beneficial if the book focused on hardware, its primary goal is to teach something other than hardware-specific definitions. HDL serves as a bridge to illustrate communication with predefined logic gates.

The book should include a mention or an appendix to clarify its real-world applications. By the end of chapter five, I was dissatisfied, feeling a lack of control over the crucial aspects of the hardware I just built. However, a book can only do justice to some of the missing pieces of information we have.

I found Chapter 5 to be quite challenging, largely because it took a while to understand the combinatorial way in which any of the chip parts would get new inputs and so on, especially coming from a traditional sequential programming background.

What specifically did you feel like you were lacking from the language?

This was my experience with the course as well. It was fun but not useful.

Learning Verilog later really opened the world of digital design for me and has let me build actually useful things. It's probably a non-goal though for this coarse to turn people into digital designers, this seems more aimed at people with a passing interest in HW as opposed to those who really want to go deep.

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