From a technical point of view, GHDL is a GCC front-end: it compiles VHDL files into objects files, like GCC does for C, C++, Fortran or Ada95 files. GHDL does not generate intermediate C files.
GHDL is written in Ada95. I use the GNAT compiler (the GCC Ada compiler) to create the binary image. The GHDL source includes AGCC, an Ada binding for interfacing with GCC.
The GHDL run-time library is written in Ada95 too. It uses some of the Ada95 and GNAT packages.
You can read the GHDL documentation online. Thanks to Sakasita Yuichi from cyber-labo, a japanese translation is available. However, this version is not the latest one, but was last updated in March 2005.
Copyright (C) 2004 Tristan Gingold -- tgingold AT free DOT fr
Last modified: Sun Mar 13 10:29:00 CET 2005