Tangentially related: Four or five years ago I was an R&D intern working on replacing an ancient EOL'd embedded processor. We were targeting an FPGA with a soft

Tangentially related: Four or five years ago I was an R&D intern working on replacing an ancient EOL'd embedded processor. We were targeting an FPGA with a soft processor (Alterra's Nios II), and found out they were powerful enough to run Linux directly. The device was doing realtime motion control, so we slapped two soft cores onto the FPGA and had them talk over drop-in bus. One did realtime, the other ran Python. It was a nifty way to hack on an HTTP status page, a test runner... not sure if it ever shipped.