How does this compare to chisel [1] , i never could get around the whole scala tooling - seemed a bit over the top. Though i guess it is a bit more mature and probably more enterprisey

[1]https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel

> While VHDL makes a fun academic toy language, ...

I spent the first half of my career working at some of the largest companies at the time on huge communication ASICs that were all written in VHDL, there was no Verilog in sight.

As much as I prefer to write Verilog now, VHDL is without question a more robust and better specified language, with features that Verilog only gained a decade later through SystemVerilog.

There's a reason why almost all major EDA tool support VHDL just as well as Verilog.

I disagree. We've produced numerous complex chips with VHDL over the last 30 years. Most of the vendor models we have to integrate with are Verilog, so perhaps it is more popular, but that's no problem for us. We've found plenty of bugs for both VHDL and Verilog in the commercial tooling we use, neither is particularly worse (providing you're happy to steer clear of the more recent VHDL language features).

VHDL still dominates in medical, military, avionics, space etc. and it's generally considered the safer RTL language, any industry that requires functional safety seems to prefer it.

It's also the most used language for FPGA in Europe but that's probably mostly cultural.