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Comment by gsmecher | Hacker News Reader

What you see is all there is.

At a certain scale, it's conventional for hardware designs to become complex enough that it's necessary to structure them in hierarchies, just to maintain control. This design is small enough that none of the extra structure is essential.

It's possible to be incredibly expressive in Verilog and VHDL. This implementation is written in VHDL, which has an outdated reputation for being long-winded.

Also worth a look: FemtoRV32 Quark [0], which is written in Verilog.

[0]: https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

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Have you seen the OPC series of CPUs? (One Page Computing - the challenge being to keep the code small enough to be printed onto a single sheet of line printer paper!)

Yup! Thanks for pointing OPC [0] out. These CPUs were a huge eye-opener - and a huge lesson about the value of using a standardized instruction set.

Building a custom CPU commits you to writing an assembler and listing generator - which is a good hobby-project job for one person who's handy with Python. After stumbling through those foothills, though, I found myself at the base of some very steep, scary GCC/binutils cliffs wondering how I could have gotten so lost, so far from home.

Even if all RISC-V does is offer a bunch of arbitrary answers to arbitrary design questions, I consider it a massive win.

[0]: https://revaldinho.github.io/opc/

Yes, I also found the idea of tangling with GCC (or even llvm) less than appealing. It's not the initial work that puts me off, but the ongoing maintenance cost. For my own project (EightThirtyTwo) I ended up writing a backend for the VBCC C compiler. The downsides are (a) no C++ support, and (b) an unusual license - but the upsides were (a) a build process that takes seconds, not hours, (b) a simple generic RISC backend one can use as a starting point, and (c) a compiler lightweight enough that it could be self-hosting. (I can compile C code for EightThirtyTwo using an Amiga!)

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