On Tue, 2015-05-05 at 19:01 +0200, Tristan Gingold wrote:
> I am pretty sure that GCC isn't
> the right engine to optimize a design - at least not at the high
> level.

At least gcc could simplify away all generate statements and other
generic-dependent branches. These are often used with a low
granularity so a noticeable speedup could be obtained there.
It could also certainly simplify logic expressions, reveal memory
allocations of statically-known size, etc.
Any decent compiler framework can do that, so I don't think it's a
matter of choosing gcc or something else.

I see another way of handling ieee libs that are poorly written, from 
a simulation speed perspective: GHDL could declare optimized built-in
implementations of critical ieee lib functions, like gcc does for many
C library function calls.
Or, intermediate approach, maybe just inlining all basic std_logic
functions could bring a significant speedup.

These builtin implementations could even be used by default, with a
parameter to let the user indicate he explicitely wants to use ghdl
-compiled ieee libs, for specific personal purposes.

So I'm pretty confident gcc is currently much underused, and these
optimization opportunities seem very much worth a try, don't you think?

Adrien


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