hardcaml VS seed7

title: Accelerating zk-SNARKs - MSM and NTT algorithms on FPGAs with Hardcaml

Any reason the title deviates so much from original? Is it because of all the cool acronyms and code words? Here's a decoder:

zk-SNARK: zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge

MSM: Multi-Scalar Multiplication

Hardcaml: OCaml lib for hardware: https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

NTT: Number Theoretic Transform

Perhaps peripheral (the original site has been hugged to death).

Both clashlang: https://clash-lang.org/

And Hardcaml: https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

have personally fueled my interest in hardware.

Dan Luu speaks eloquently and at length about how better options are needed for logic design. I would recommend both of the above to the enthusiastic novice.

Join JS and you can program FPGAs in a strongly typed, expressive, high level programming language (OCaml): https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

[1] https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

> You can put all the functions/tasks you want in that module.

Coming from a software background, the testing strategies available in Verilog seem very clunky and overly verbose. In comparison, Hardcaml's ASCII waveform expect-test solution feels extremely elegant and simple: https://blog.janestreet.com/using-ascii-waveforms-to-test-ha....

> And all of my development and that of my team happens through gitlab-CI.

That's probably more of a gap in my education than a fault of the ecosystem then.

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Among other qualities, I prefer languages that let fewer mistakes slip through, and allow the developer to focus on the system they intend to build rather than avoiding bugs/misunderstandings that would be easy to catch otherwise. You bring up a lot of really good points, and I suspect that if we were doing Verilog "the right way", we would have probably run into fewer issues. But at the end of the day, developing in Hardcaml was a much more ergonomic experience: testing was straightforward, most "stupid mistakes" were impossible, setup was pretty easy, and the library provided a lot of really useful abstractions. For example, Hardcaml interfaces make it easy to represent practically any data structure that can be serialized to/from a bit vector, and the Always API allows for some pretty interesting non-trivial functional logic.

https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml/blob/master/docs/hard...

A few months ago, I came across the Signals and Threads Programmable Hardware episode. I really liked the idea of Hardcaml: a library to write and test hardware designs in OCaml. Representing circuits as functions felt like a good abstraction, and I’ve been wanting to learn OCaml for a while.

This release is available at GitHub and SF. There is also a Seed7 installer for windows, which downloads the newest version from SF. The Seed7 Homepage stays at its usual place. There is also a mirror of the Seed7 Homepage at GitHub.

Seed7 at GitHub

bugmagnet@LAPTOP-H6HBEGA9:~$ git clone https://github.com/ThomasMertes/seed7 Cloning into 'seed7'... remote: Enumerating objects: 21021, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (4660/4660), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1118/1118), done. remote: Total 21021 (delta 3677), reused 4454 (delta 3515), pack-reused 16361 Receiving objects: 100% (21021/21021), 15.95 MiB | 6.47 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (18593/18593), done. bugmagnet@LAPTOP-H6HBEGA9:~$ cd seed7 bugmagnet@LAPTOP-H6HBEGA9:~/seed7$ make -f src/mk_linux.mak depend make: *** No rule to make target 'chkccomp.c', needed by 'chkccomp'. Stop.

No. You can see at GitHub that I update Seed7 quite often. Approximately once a month I do a release and this release is announced at r/seed7 and here.

The packages are not updated so often. So you are more up-to-date with the releases (or even more up-to-date by pulling from GitHub).

I committed a corresponding change to GitHub (Support syntax statements without $ (dollar)).

This release is available at GitHub and SF. There is also a Seed7 installer for windows, which downloads the newest version from SF. The Seed7 Homepage stays at its usual place. There is also a mirror of the Seed7 Homepage which uses HTTPS.

Yes, I am regularly working on improvements for Seed7. The changes are checked in at GitHub (see here for the list of commits) and once a month I do a release which is announced at r/seed7.

It all depends on the circumstances behind. In the beginning the core-js maintainer had no family and now he has. When I released Seed7 I already had a family. It was clear that my job had to support my family and my hobby (GitHub link).

Syntax highlighting for the Nano editor has been added. Many thanks to Duke Normandin for creating seed7.nanorc.