gEDA: Icarus Verilog Snapshot 20050617

[Stephen Williams <steve@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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Well folks, this is the first snapshot since October of last year,
and the very first since the 0.8 release. The big difference is
that it is all different. Specifically, the vvp is restructured
considerably, making data be passed around as vectors instead of
large arrays of bits, etc. This is a sign of the future, and is
what I've been working on these past 9 months.

<ftp://ftp.icarus.com/pub/eda/verilog/snapshots/verilog-20050617.tar.gz>

~  WARNING: This is a *development* snapshot. Those of you used to using
~  the latest snapshot for normal work will be shocked, as this is
~  *worse* in many ways then 0.8. This is *not* the place to look for
~  simple bug fixes for 0.8.x.

So what's the big deal? The internal structure of vvp is changed
so that the data type for data is divorced from the topology of
the netlist. This allows for the internal netlist to (theoretically)
carry data of arbitrary type. This means first of that I'm mostly
passing *vectors* around instead of single bits as in the 0.8.
This also means that I'm *not* carring strength data around with
the bits, unless the node actually wants it.

The theory is that this will allow for more optimal handling of
wide data paths. This should also allow for data paths that are
not vector data at all. This will hopefully allow for real-valued,
string valued, 2-vector valued (etc.) "bits" to be passed around,
instead of processing those things as lots of strength-aware scalars.

That's theory. At the moment, it actually runs *slower* then 0.8 for
the same program. I'll work on that before moving on to the fancy
stuff.

For this to work out, I also had to rework the ivl_target API some.
The good news is that the API is actually a bit cleaner and better
documented now.

And the really good news, the vvp run binary is *much* easier to
read and to understand. (The ivl core compiler is still heavy reading,
of course.)


- --
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com           But I have promises to keep,
http://www.icarus.com         and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."
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