Bringing the power of Eclipse to Digital

Hardware designersHendrik EeckhautMark ChristiaensLieven Lemiengre

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HELLOMY NAME IS

@heeckhau

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Eclipse

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• Navigation

• Autocomplete

• Real-time errors

• Quick-assist/fix

• Refactoring

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hardware development toolkit

Bring power of Eclipse to Digital Hardware Designers

VHDL

• 20 year old language (based on Ada)

• all shortcomings of arcane languages• verbose

• irregular

• ...

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Perfect fit for ?

• Xtext looks like perfect fit:• navigation

• type time syntax checking

• linting and quick-fixes

• formatting

• But: Powerful enough for VHDL?

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Grammar

• navigation

• type time syntax checking

• linting and quick-fixes

• formatting

Demo

Xtext experience

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Results

Effort

EMFAntlr

Guice

Xtext

Eclipse

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Overview

Lessons learnt ?

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• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Grammar

• Lexer: No problems(We had ANTLR grammar to start from)

• Parser: No semantic predicates

• Keep track of the number/size of objects that are created

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Grammar

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Scoping

• A lot harder than expected

• Difficult to debug (declarative approach, lazy evaluation)

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Scoping

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

User Interface

• Works as expected : outline, preferences, templates, folding, (syntax and semantic) highlighting

• Xtext team keeps adding nice improvements

• Some scalability issues: Large files are problematic in UI (n2 problems)

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UI

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Autocomplete

• Autocomplete based on grammar/scope is not powerful enough• autocomplete is mostly triggered for

incomplete code (incorrect context)

• extended toolkit would be better

• Most VHDL autocompletes are manually designed

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Autocomplete

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Formatting

• Needs a lot of customization

• A lot cleaner to implement than what e.g. Emacs does

• Priority of rules not always clear

• Custom extension for vertical alignment

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Formatting

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Testing

• Xtext itself contains good starting points

• Dependency injection (Guice) makes it easy to test

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Testing

• Grammar

• Scoping

• UI

• Autocomplete

• Formatting

• Testing

• Performance

Performance

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• Xtext continuously improves

• Sigasi patches: Parallel loading, Model Caching

• Memory usage OKPerformance

Unresolved Xtext issues

• Type system

• Opening non-project files

• Preprocessing

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?

Conclusions

• Xtext is really powerful technology

• Gives great architecture/structure

• Getting started is easy

• But... still a lot of work

• Devil is in the details

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