Is It a Good Idea to Build an HLS Tool on Top of MLIR? Experience from Building the Dynamatic HLS Compiler

When the MLIR project was first introduced, it promised to address the issues that the HLS community had with the LLVM project. But is this really the case, and is MLIR the “right”/“best” compiler infrastructure for HLS? We here share our experiences based on the development of Dynamatic (github.com/EPFL-LAP/dynamatic).