icestudio VS bsc

In fact that docs are out of date and even more boards are supported and you can find the list directly in icestudio menu. If you want to check it beforehand, i think it's possible to see the list here in source code:

https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/tree/develop/app/resou...

This is crazy helpful for beginners: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio

They have drag and drop visual gates and cores with very well documented examples.

This is the project: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio

I am slowly moving off my retro computing hobby. The last straw was recent chip shortage and crazy prices. I bought myself a copy of "The 8088 Project Book" and I wanted to build the presented 8088 breadboard computer. Guess what? The only factory that was building compatible 8088/8086 chips caught fire (Renesas factory fire). I had to order 20 year old chips for the price x2 of the new chips. But not only that, some chips are either unavailable or crazy expensive due to a lot of recent interests in retro-comp.

In other way, the hobby became unreasonably expensive for me. So I decided to move my interests into FPGA. The fun is almost the same, but the cost is way lower (you only need to buy a good board and a book, and you are set up). I started with this extremely simple IDE: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio

As for this build, I have mixed feelings about using FPGAs to revive old computers. Can't we create something new out of it? It would be fun to have a _modern_ FPGA based SBC with easy to program graphics (memory mapped) and with simple device interface (I think USB is way too complicated for hobbyists). Just something powerful enough to create games, yet simple enough so that teenager can write a simple OS in his spare time.

Many companies do just write entire modern SoCs in straight Verilog (maybe with some autogenerated Verilog hacked in there) with no other major organization tools aside from the typical project management stuff. The load-store unit of a modern CPU alone easily exceeds 10k lines of Verilog. It's a similar thing as people who work with kernels—after all, the page table management code in a modern operating system like Linux is absolutely monstrous but still people are able to understand it well enough to be able to make the changes they need and get out.

If you are interested in other languages which hope to make this sort of stuff easier, I'd recommend taking a look at design productivity languages like Chisel and it's associated Chipyard [1], SpinalHDL [2], and Bluespec [3]. Each of these are meant to make defining extremely complex hardware more manageable for humans and there's a lot of interesting work going on right now with each of them.

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

[2] https://github.com/SpinalHDL/SpinalHDL

[3] https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc

What are your thoughts on other HDLs like Chisel or BlueSpec when it comes to better type checking?

In a previous project we used Haskell that compiled down to Verilog to design hardware. Think along the lines of BlueSpec or Clash. Haskell would force you to spell out the new state as a function of the old state of the system. This would let us do gate-level simulations of the hardware we designed. Coupled with Haskell's penchant for using primes to mean "the new value of", stuff like x' = f x was very common.

You should look at Bluespec, they are doing some interesting stuff.

And I've been involved in a project that's making heavy use of Bluespec: https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc/

Same problem though - you have to transpile it down to Verilog to use it in anything beyond a simulation.

FPGA Thread: Bluespec SystemVerilog is now completely open source, very nice HDL although quite opinionated.

https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc

it's Haskell underneath (https://xkcd.com/356/)