circt VS Verilog.jl

MLIR (https://mlir.llvm.org/) is a quickly growing compiler toolkit which attempts to synthesize the learnings of LLVM and currently powers compilers for programming languages, machine learning and circuit design (https://github.com/llvm/circt). and there are a ton of companies with real employees working on it (including Microsoft) and MLIR is at the core of Chris Lattner’s new company, ModularAI. I’d recommend taking a look at it, there are a large number of ways to get involved and a number of paths from contributor to employee.

Might be good to target the CIRCT infrastructure at some point.

Even small optimizations like removing unused pins from internal modules are often times opposed.

Chris Lattner and others are currently working on an "industry" version of firrtl as part of the CIRCT hardware compiler framework: https://github.com/llvm/circt

Did you see the work being done on CIRCT? https://github.com/llvm/circt

I remember one of the reasons you did not want to use firrtl was that its compiler is implemented in Scala and thus hard to integrate into other projexts. CIRCT will solve that problem by providing a firrtl compiler implemented in C++. Other languages like Verilog/VHDL and new high level languages for HLS-like designs are also on the todo list.

Relevant: https://github.com/llvm/circt

It doesn't have to be. I once made a julia->verilog transpiler that even recompiled your julia functions with verilator, so you could verify that the code was correct.

https://github.com/interplanetary-robot/Verilog.jl

Of course, gaining traction on something like this is tricky.

I actually think Erlang/BEAM would be a great choice for making EDA tools, because it has concurrent execution model that you could probably very easily make play nice in rudimentary simulations of circuits that have triggers (`always @` sort of stuff.

A long long long time ago, I wrote this (currently very unmaintained) julia project, don't know if this is useful to you, but it's pretty clear that there is a LOT of potential for julia in this domain: https://github.com/interplanetary-robot/Verilog.jl