On Saturday, January 07, 2012 22:04:41 David Koontz wrote:
> I'm going to try this on for shock value, then show a light at the end of
> the tunnel.

Thanks for the response. I wish I was more shocked, but the situation as you 
summarized was close to my impression.

I think a big issue that plagues open HDL tools in general is that there are 
not tons of people who simultaneously 1) are very interested in HDLs, 2) 
care about the availabilty of free & open tools, 3) are savvy enough to 
develop or contribute to an [unconventional] compiler, 4) actually have time 
to do something about it. I remember when the software world felt a bit like 
this (~20 years ago?) though, so hopefully we are on the road to growth as a 
community.

Anyway, I'm trying to keep the Debian GHDL package alive at least ... so I 
thought I'd get some feelers out to see if anyone had actually made some 
progress. =)

> Now for the good news.  I recently came across someone doing a VHDL
> analyzer and simulator inspired by GHDL, written in C.  There is one
> very interesting characteristic although the code is being organically
> grown (incrementally implemented, meaning potentially doing things over
> as you add complexity).  It uses the LLVM code generator (back end)
> which is separable from the front end, uncoupling some of the forced
> synchronization like you're noting with trying to go beyond gcc-4.3.4
> and gnat 4.4.

Can you link to any information about the C-based VHDL development you came 
across? This (and other VHDL + LLVM related ideas you mentioned) do sound 
good.
 
> As far as your immediate problem other than Thomas Sailer at the Fedora
> Project  with the multilib stuff, no.  His patches ought to be evaluate
> fro inclusion in ghdl. On the surface gnat-4.6 seems separable from
> multilibs.
> 
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/16/Everything
> /source/SRPMS/ghdl-0.29-2.143svn.4.fc16.src.rpm (43+ MB)  See the
> ghdl.spec file.

Right now the situation is that the current Debian GHDL package can no 
longer build even with no changes, so there is a risk that GHDL will no 
longer be included in Debian if I can't get it fixed. =(

This may be [the source of](?) the same stuff that the Ubuntu packages 
patched into the base gcc-4.3. In any case, I'll take a look and see if I 
can roll some of this into the Debian GHDL package.

Thanks again for the info!

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