D for reconfigurable computing?

[Roel Meeuws]

Hi there,

I've been looking at D for some time now, and there are quite some interesting
features there! And because I feel this language has potential, I would like
to suggest a feature that would be beneficial within my research discipline.
I'm working with reconfigurable computing, and to be more precise at the
moment our group is automatically translating high-level languages to
hardware. This would make it possible for non-hardware designers to take
advantage of FPGAs and the like.

Anyway, the feature that about every language out there is lacking is easy
bitlevel manipulation... You will ask, why the heck would you want to do that?
Well, when considering cpus that do not make direct bitlevel manipulation
possible I would agree, but the future will not have a big role for "old" ways
of thinking. There will be hybrid environments with accelerators and FPGAs
etc. And doing a bitreversal without a for-loop and xors and shifts is
probably a lot easier...

How could this be done? When the elementary type bit is added and any integer
type can be casted to a bitarray and back, we would basically be done. Maybe
this could also make it possible to define arbitrary size integers like
1024-bit integer or something. Of course, this would require generic
implementations for any integer operators.

Anyway these were my two cents...


greetz,

Roel