Neither Xilinx nor Intel are in the business of making simulators (and in both cases, it shows). If there is an opportunity to graft the LLVM model into the FPG

Neither Xilinx nor Intel are in the business of making simulators (and in both cases, it shows). If there is an opportunity to graft the LLVM model into the FPGA world, IMO it's the simulators. Unfortunately it requires some creativity to support encrypted RTL in an open-source simulator, and both vendors require a way to supply simulation models without exposing source code. Doubly unfortunately, the open-source simulators are all language-specific and any attempts to bridge the gap have been only limited experiments. A brand-new simulator architecture seems necessary but has its oxygen starved by the rest of the ecosystem, open-source and commercial. I am watching https://github.com/llvm/circt https://github.com/llvm/circt with interest but I don't think this is quite focused on simulators the way I think is necessary.