Python to VHDL using LLVM; was "Re: LLVMdev Digest, Vol 123, Issue 3"

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#1

The only VHDL to LLVM project that I know of is nvc. [0] I haven't
tried it personally and from a cursory look through the source it
seems like there is a LLVM backend and a "native" backend (not sure
what that means). If you're really crazy you might want to see if you
could massage GHDL [1] (VHDL GCC frontend) + DragonEgg [2] (LLVM
backend for GCC) to get you LLVM IR.

I'm not sure about Python to LLVM. There was Unladen Swallow [3] but
that was abandoned a while ago.

Cheers,
Jevin

[0]: https://github.com/nickg/nvc
[1]: https://gna.org/projects/ghdl/
[2]: http://dragonegg.llvm.org/
[3]: https://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan

#2

This won't help the OP target VHDL, but there are a few people working on
Pyston: https://codereview.chromium.org/536483002/

#3

The link should be https://github.com/dropbox/pyston.

Grumble grumble first-day-of-the-week email...

#4

Yep we’re doing a bit of Python-to-LLVM and would be happy to chat, but as Reid said I don’t think Pyston would be helpful if you wanted to target anything other than local execution. There are some other Python-to-LLVM projects out there: I’ll shamelessly plug the predecessor to Pyston, “icbd”, as something that might be more relevant, since it’s a static Python-to-llvm compiler. https://github.com/kmod/icbd/tree/master/icbd/compiler

Another interesting project is Numba ( http://numba.pydata.org/ ) – I believe they focus more on the HPC/numerical computing use case, which might be likely to be a match given the target of VHDL.

I’m not familiar with any LLVM-to-VHDL HLS tools, but I imagine they have to exist (a quick search for “LLVM HLS” turns up some results).