> The FPGA, with its explicit management of every imaginable resource, is the worst target for a general-purpose functional programming language.
That's a great way to put it...
but perhaps there's a more suitable FPGA cell for functional programming (than block lookup tables with state)? Maybe something with a local stack, recursion assistance, an iterator?
Also, a good deal of the FPGA resource management is focused on optimization... What if the optimization-at-all-costs constraint were relaxed somewhat, or supplanted with meta-information to indicate the completion of a group of cells to allow a message to propagate?
With relaxed constraints partial, on-the-fly and self- modifications could become regular features.
> Maybe something with a local stack, recursion assistance, an iterator? [...] supplanted with meta-information to indicate the completion of a group of cells to allow a message to propagate?
What you're describing sounds a lot more like many CPU cores connected by a network than like an FPGA. The point of an FPGA is that it gives you very precise and flexible control over things like timing and interconnects. Without that, FPGAs are actually pretty slow and you'd better use a CPU.
> With relaxed constraints partial, on-the-fly and self- modifications could become regular features.
There's a reason why self-modifying software is restricted to niche use cases: it's hard to reason about. Dynamic partial reconfiguration is slowly becoming a thing in FPGA design, but it's typically used to work around resource limitations.
That's a great way to put it...
but perhaps there's a more suitable FPGA cell for functional programming (than block lookup tables with state)? Maybe something with a local stack, recursion assistance, an iterator?
Also, a good deal of the FPGA resource management is focused on optimization... What if the optimization-at-all-costs constraint were relaxed somewhat, or supplanted with meta-information to indicate the completion of a group of cells to allow a message to propagate?
With relaxed constraints partial, on-the-fly and self- modifications could become regular features.