On Jan 4, 2014, at 6:27 PM, Rob Doyle <radioengr at gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/4/2014 2:34 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:57 PM, Rob Doyle <radioengr at gmail.com> wrote:
...
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.
The documents call the executable format "mcode". I guess I /assumed/ it
was some kind of a bytecode.
I quick google search for GHDL and mcode does not provide much
illumination on the exact nature of "mcode" but it is not a windows
executable.
There?s next to nothing in Google, quite unusual. One of the meanings of ?mcode? seems to
tie to Matlab. I wonder if that?s valid. Then again, another is a shorthand for ?machine
code?.
Looking at the code, I see stuff that looks like it turns mcode into x86 machine code. So
this feels a bit like a limited-purpose compiler/assembler/linker all in one so people
working in Windows don?t have to figure out how to run GCC. Not that this is hard, so I
wonder what the point is.
It also looks like there is a Mac version of the mcode variant of GHDL, so that confirms
the notion that this is an alternative back end. Conversely, it might well be possible to
build a GCC flavored GHDL for Windows, if you really want to run Windows...
paul