> So, John, I hope this letter illustrates some of the reasons why people
> are picking our Cynthesizer for real hardware & system design and not
> George's, seemingly appropriately named, "BS Compiler".
>
>     - Brett Cline of Forte Design Systems
>       http://www.deepchip.com/items/0459-05.html


From: Duraid Madina <duraid=user domain=kinoko.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
To: Brett Cline <brett=user domain=forteds not mom>
Cc: John Cooley <jcooley=user domain=zeroskew not mom>

Hi, Brett,

Thanks for bashing Bluespec -- the fewer people use it, the longer I get to
keep another competitive edge as a designer.  ;)  I do have one question,
though.  Have you, Brett, actually written any Bluespec code yourself?

After reading your reply to George Harper on the DeepChip site, I was amused
that nothing in it actually rebutted George's ultimate claim that the Forte
system is *just* RTL, with loads of syntactic sugar added.  This is not to
say that your sugar doesn't offer a real improvement over straight Verilog
(or whatever) for designers -- I'm sure it does -- but it's clear to me at
least you have no real understanding of what it's like to design hardware
with Bluespec.  You should learn!  Get a demo license and spend a few days
at it, if only to know what the competition is up to?

In the meantime, you'll have to take it from me: while it's undeniably true
that Bluespec *has* to interoperate with existing RTL code and existing RTL
designers, designers using Bluespec really are working on a higher plane.
That doesn't guarantee their success, though.  I mean hey, look how many
people still use Windows.  ;)

    - Duraid Madina
      Tokyo University                           Japan