Plenty of commercial development on that front recently. Forte Design Systems [1] is selling tools targeting both FPGA and ASIC design using a C++ class library front end (SystemC). Synopsys has two flows in their Synphony product line, one which synthesizes from C called Synphony C Compiler [2] and another flow based on Matlab libraries which isn't really synthesis per se but supports mapping between Matlab Simulink to FGPAs [3].
Use of these (including AutoESL) seem focused on certain domains. Image processing, cryptography and machine vision seem popular areas just now.
[1] http://www.forteds.com/products/cynthesizer.asp [2] http://www.synopsys.com/Systems/BlockDesign/HLS/Pages/Synpho... [3] http://www.synopsys.com/Systems/BlockDesign/HLS/Pages/Synpho...