Obviously hardware development looks hard and weird to software people, in the same way C++ looks weird to an EE. It's slow only because the synthesizer makes

Obviously hardware development looks hard and weird to software people, in the same way C++ looks weird to an EE. It's slow only because the synthesizer makes huge efforts in the optimization of the design, trying to pack the logic in as little resources as possible. Shut down optimizations and suddenly its blazing fast (like icarus verilog).