Not Leaky, Just Wrong
Intel recently announced new tools for FPGA design. I should probably try to understand OpenCL better before bagging on it, but when I read, "[OpenCL] allows users to abstract away hardware-specific development and use a higher-level software development flow." I cringe. I don't think that's how we get to a productive, higher-level of abstraction in FPGA design. When you look at the progress of software from low-level detailed design to high-level abstract design you see assembly to C to Java to Python (to pick one line of progression among many). The thing that happened every time a new higher-level language gained traction is people recognized patterns that developers were using over and over in one language and made language features in a new language that made those patterns one-liners to implement. Examples of design patterns turning into language features are, in assembly people developed the patterns of function calls: push arguments onto the stack, save...