firrtl

Flexible Internal Representation for RTL

This repository contains the compiler for .fir files. It is currently being developed in stanza, with the end-goal to translate into scala for ease of other people to use. This decision was made for multiple reasons:
1. Previous development had already been done in stanza
2. Most of the passes are relatively language independent
3. Stanza is easier to develop in than scala bc less-strict type system
4. As a favor, its useful to develop in stanza to give Patrick some language tips :)
The hardest part to port will likely be the parser, but we hope to use an existing scala-based general-purpose parser for the port.

Installation Instructions

Disclaimer: This project is going through development stages so there is no guarantee anything works.

For Linux:

1. Clone the repository:
   git clone https://github.com/ucb-bar/firrtl
2. Install lit (you need to have pip installed first):
   pip install lit
3. Build firrtl:
   make build
4. Add firrtl/utils/bin to your PATH, so that the compiled firrtl will be available anywhere. This also makes FileCheck available for the tests.
5. Rename FileCheck_linux in firrtl/utils/bin to FileCheck. The original FileCheck is a compiled Mac version and will not run on Linux.
   Note: This compiled binary may not run on all platforms. You may need to build Clang/LLVM from source to extract the compiled FileCheck utility.
6. Run tests:
   make check
7. Build and test:
   make

For Mac:

1. Clone the repository:
   git clone https://github.com/ucb-bar/firrtl
2. Install lit (you need to have pip installed first):
   pip install lit
3. Build firrtl:
   make build
4. Run tests:
   make check
5. Build and test:
   make

Scala implementation

The Scala FIRRTL implementation relies upon sbt 0.13.6. It uses sbt-assembly to create a fat JAR.
Using a bash script and a symbolic link it can be used with the same command-line arguments as the stanza implementation.
Example use:
make build-scala
make set-scala # Creates symbolic link, make set-stanza reverts to stanza implementation
./utils/bin/firrtl -i <input> -o <output> -X <compiler>