On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:57 PM, Rob Doyle <radioengr at gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/2/2014 2:40 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
VHDL is clearly inspired by Ada. I?ve done some
elementary VHDL work
and like it a lot. FWIW, there is an open source VHDL simulator
available (just a simulator, not tied to any real world FPGA) that?s
integrated into GCC ? called GHDL. It seems to work well; I?ve fed
it some rather large models that simulate nicely.
Technically GHDL isn't a simulator. It is just another front-end to GCC.
On linux, GHDL compiles VHDL into an executable - just like any other
programming language.
On windoze, GHDL compiles VHDL into bytecode, I think. I've had some
issues with the windoze version. YMMV.
Not that you'd want to, but, you could use VHDL as just another
programming language.
I used the term ?simulator? to mean something that executes a VHDL model (as opposed to
synthesizing a design for an FPGA or an ASIC).
GHDL compiles into bytecode on Windows? That seems unlikely. As you said, it?s a
language front end for the GCC compiler suite. The target OS has little effect on what
code GCC generates. I wouldn?t expect Windows GDHL to produce byte code any more than I
would expect the Windows C compiler in GCC to produce byte code. Both should produce
machine code for whatever your target machine is.
paul