Are [vhdl] questions on-topic for Code Review?

Question

To date, we have had four questions about VHDL, a language for describing digital circuits. Of those questions, one was closed for containing broken code.

Should vhdl be considered on-topic or off-topic for Code Review?

On one hand, it does fit within a broad definition of "code", and VHDL code can certainly be reviewed.

On the other hand, it's very low-level code, and there just doesn't seem to be much interest or expertise in the Code Review community to answer these questions. There are certainly more VHDL experts on Electrical Engineering.

Some possibilities are:

1. Routinely migrate requests to review vhdl to EE (on grounds that VHDL is off-topic for CR),
2. Ask authors to repost their questions on EE,
3. Try to entice EE users to try their hand at reviewing vhdl here on CR,
4. Do nothing, and let these questions languish here.

Your thoughts?

Answer 1

I'd take that bullet list backwards:

4. Do nothing, and let these questions languish here.

Certainly not. That doesn't help anyone.

3. Try to entice EE users to try their hand at reviewing vhdl here on CR

With 4 questions in some 18 months since the tag's creation, bringing EE users here is a bit of a stretch. Not impossible, but you'd have to find an EE user that's more into programming, I believe.

2. Ask authors to repost their questions on EE

That sounds more realistic. The question isn't off-topic on CR, it's just that Stack Exchange happens to have a more specialized site where vhdl might have a wider audience. I don't see cross-posting as a problem. Unless...

1. Routinely migrate requests to review vhdl to EE (on grounds that VHDL is off-topic for CR)

Off-topic... but on what grounds? I know nothing about it, but VHDL sure looks like code to me. Not to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source, but...

Due to the Department of Defense requiring as much of the syntax as possible to be based on Ada, in order to avoid re-inventing concepts that had already been thoroughly tested in the development of Ada,^{[citation needed]} VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada programming language in both concepts and syntax.

_{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL}

And

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages.

_{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)}

Looks like a programming language to me, and a useful one on top of it. I think considering it off-topic just because we don't have the expertise is fraying with a slippery slope. Would php be off-topic if there weren't enough reviewers for it?

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I vote for #2 (cross-posting), and if people there start sending vhdl askers over here, then they'll inevitably hopefully bring some reviewers along with these questions. Perhaps some of these reviewers know some c or c++, too. At the end of the day, it's about visibility / getting the right eyes on the piece of code.