We present a hardware description language (currently called HaSCoL) which is based on both reliable and unreliable message passing and implicit pipelining of message handlers. The language consists of a small core and a number of extensions, which cover many features of high level software languages as well as high level hardware description languages (HDLs). These extensions have simple projections into the core language and allow compact and concise description of complex algorithms. The core language in turn can be converted into efficient VHDL. We discuss place-and-route results for some benchmarks implemented both in HaSCoL and VHDL and suggest an optimization which should improve the results significantly and make them close to those for hand-coded VHDL.