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Comment by BracketMaster | Hacker News Reader

One thing people don't often bring up is how great nim is for writing DSLs.

DSLs really matter in the hardware and digital design space - a space that seems to be completely devoid of innovation when it comes to tooling.

A couple languages that try to bring RTL into the 21st century are nMigen-Python and Chisel-Scala.

I'm currently writing an RTL in Nim.

Nim's macro system allows you to do really cool things like instantiate named RTL wires and create custom operators like `:=` for Signal assignment. Really excited about tier 1 BigNum support coming soon - which will make it easier to simulate arbitrary width integer signal arithmetic.

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This sounds cool, I would be very interested if you had any public code. It’s _very_ early days but I’m working on a similar project in Swift: https://github.com/circt/Edith

It's great to see reference to hardware design in this thread.

Not hardware, but I have been using Nim for DPI-C interface with SystemVerilog for quite some time. Few weeks back, I started tinkering with Nim macros, and started working on a project to make the VPI interface more approachable.

This language is kind of a hidden gem that not many people are aware of in the HDL/HVL space.

Please consider creating a write up about this. As someone that had very little knowledge about the hardware design space I'd love to learn more about it and see how Nim solves some problems there :)

Do you have anything public? I’ve been following LLHD for a while; I like the idea of a shared middle end. LLHD’s front end is Verilog/VHDL which are … not great.

Are you translating, or building your own sim runtime?

Simulator is written internally in Nim. There isn't really a good FOSS IR for RTL sims on the market currently. I absolutely refuse to use MLIR or anything based on LLVM for that matter. LLVM takes up to 40 minutes to rebuild on my Apple silicon. This is completely unacceptable in terms of rapid iteration.

LLHD is greenfield code, so it’s not based on LLVM. I’m familiar with the authors both academically (15 years ago), and on an engineering level (now). I think it is definitely worth reviewing what they’re bringing to the table.

Anyways, I think the RTL market is ripe for disruption. There was a lot of great language work done by, for instance, Ronald Garcia, directly aimed at fixing pain points in HDLs, like parsmetrization.

Nim really had fantastic potential for RTL and other hardware interaction languages. Best of luck in making progress with the RTL! I’d be really interested if it could become something for program CPLD or FPGA included in some microcontrollers now.

Not yet - but keep an eye out here: https://github.com/chipeleven

Yep, one of the main things I did with nim for the month or 2 I was really into it was write a duktape wrapper[0] (in retrospect, I should have made the name a pun related to wrapping with tape...). It was pretty interesting given the stack-based nature of almost every duktape operation.

[0]: https://github.com/coolreader18/duk

Isn’t the bottleneck there the core software being proprietary? I think even verilog (which is quite old) doesn’t have a mature FOSS compiler+IDE.

There are also probably not that many hardware designers in the world?

Yosys is a very capable FOSS synthesizer and Verilator is a FOSS simulator actually used in production at ARM.

Yosys and Verilator are pretty capable if you are ok with their limitations. There is nothing akin to gcc or clang in the verilog world.

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