If you can write a state machine in VHDL fairly easily, then perhaps you can use Ada to do your software. VHDL is derived from Ada, so the way you structure your VHDL state machine should serve as a good starting point for an ADA version of the same behavior. But be aware that Ada semantics are not 100% the same as VHDL.
I've wondered from time to time whether there would be a straight forward way of transforming an Ada program into hardware, but VHDL does have the notion of delta delay which Ada does not. However it is possible to write a state machine in many languages, so you should not need delta delay. Ada does have tasking, which allows an Ada program to be run as several independent tasks, in a manner similar to pthreads.
If you elect to try this, you'll need GNAT, the freely available Ada compiler, which ironically enough is also used to compile GHDL from source.
(S) ===
Currently I use Tcl to have the serial port in an event loop to be able to react asynchronously to the results coming from the FPGA. Writing the state-machine is a bit awkward, and it frustrates me that I can write a hardware FSM fairly easy in VHDL, but not in any programming language that I know (c, tcl, python) I guess it is not easy to bind a serial port to ghdl and rely on the concurrency in VHDL to read, interpret and send commands the way I do in FPGA hardware, so my question is if there is a programming language which would help me that I don't know about yet. Hopefully it should run on both windows and Linux, but Linux-only is fine. Windows-only is not so fine, but ok. Assume that I have only knowledge (and not deep knowledge) of c, tcl, python, vhdl and ghdl. Any comments welcome. -- Svenn
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