Partial synth is handy when writing gnarly Bluespec modules, because it
lets you inspect the Verilog output of the Bluespec compiler as well as
Yosys's compile output at various stages of synthesis, to see if things
are being produced the way you expect.
Brute force is a naively written state machine that combines both horizontal
and vertical timings into one, in a way that unrolls comically badly. It's
obviously uncompetitive as-is, but I wanted to use that as a starting point
to see how much bsc and yosys would still be able to cope with it.
The result: the worse code takes much longer for bluespec to evaluate, and it
consumes ~4x the amount of logic elements after synthesis. Less terrible than
I expected, to be honest!
David Anderson