You didn't want another language but then mention a complicated pile of languages and libraries? And people doing high-level synthesis weren't putting "efforts

You didn't want another language but then mention a complicated pile of languages and libraries? And people doing high-level synthesis weren't putting "efforts on thinking out useful abstractions and implementing a compiler that works efficiently?" That's the opposite of true and condescending to HLS or HDL fields where building useful, efficient abstractions on hardware easy for developers has an abysmal success rate despite large brainpower and money invested. Lets look into your recommendation, though. " Just a Python library that defines useful abstractions for logic circuits building, allows to construct arbitrary graphs using them, and then compile these graphs to VHDL. " Because you're really describing either an enhanced HDL like MyHDL or a High-Level Synthesis tool. The first requires people to learn hardware to use right. That's hard for developers based on their online comments. If they do, they can make some pretty efficient designs, though. The second has shown to be easier for developers since it can be close to their way of thinking. However, turning high-level abstractions into efficient, low-level code is more like automatic programming than regular compilers given every step is NP-Hard w/ tons of constraint combinations. Like in software, automatic programming never happened: anything doing synthesis usually performs less than hand-made stuff in numerous attributes. This can be significant in affecting say the clock rate. So, CompSci is investing in both directions with numerous HDL's and HLS tools made. For HDL's, BlueSpec, Chisel, and MyHDL are probably most successful since they help hardware people handle hardware better. For HLS, I'm not sure since they don't disclose their numbers. ;) Here's a list of them, though. Bluespec is on same list so maybe its features fit in multiple categories. (shrug) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_synthesis Synflow's people were doing HLS research at a University of ironically more similar to what you brought up than most HLS. It had a parallel focus. Must have not gone anywhere or got corporate lock-in. So, they went the other route to build something easy for developers. Then open-sourced the compiler and IDE extensions along with some cheap IP and a cheap board. So, when a developer asks about doing FPGA work I reference easy-to-learn tools like that or NAND to Tetris if they want the hard route. Note: There's also commercial support for OpenCL on FPGA's by Altera. Maybe others. There's also CUDA to FPGA work. CompSci isn't being narrow: they've been hitting every idea they can think of with low adoption you see being because almost none of it works. They keep trying, though. http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~cong/papers/FCUDA_SASP09_CR.pdf http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~cong/papers/FCUDA_SASP09_CR.pdf