Yes I did quite like bluespec, though after my time using it I drew two conclusions. 1. The extra power I had to build parameterisable/configurable designs did

Yes I did quite like bluespec, though after my time using it I drew two conclusions. 1. The extra power I had to build parameterisable/configurable designs didn't help as much as you'd hope as I said in my earlier post. Making something that can deal with a large parameter space still remains hard, the easier things look a lot nicer and are less fiddly to work with but on a practical level you're not gaining much. 2. One of bluespec's big ideas is you write the rules, with conditions and it works out the rest. The problems come when this maps to verilog and you need to start fixing implementation issues. I ended up having to develop good intuition around exactly how the compiler would schedule the rules so I could avoid issues (e.g. combinational loops). It felt like bluespec really pushed you into deep pipelining, rule does one thing result gets flopped another rule will take over next cycle. Fine for some designs but sometimes you've got a whole bunch of stuff you want to get in a single cycle (e.g. within a CPU) and there I felt like the rules construct ultimately just made it harder to build anything. I do remember discovering some 'hidden' language features. Knowing it all turned into Haskell underneath via term rewriting I tried some syntactic constructs that weren't documented but I felt should work and often found they did! This gave some fairly powerful stuff to play with though never good to rely on undocumented features. As I said it was over 10 years ago so my memory is hazy, things may have improved since there as has my skill and experience. I should really take another look now the compiler is open.