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YosysHQ / yosys

Yosys Open SYnthesis Suite
https://yosyshq.net/yosys/
ISC License
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Dynamic discovery of frontend modules #1640

Open eine opened 4 years ago

eine commented 4 years ago

Coming from tgingold/ghdlsynth-beta#74 Ref #1458

To avoid specifying -m ghdl when calling yosys, it would suffice if yosys looked at the plugins available in its own plugins directory.

Regarding visibility, i.e. ghdl being shown in yosys --help, it would be up to yosys to dynamically get the list of available plugins and print them in the help. Moreover, it would be sensible to add some specific metadata to the plugin for this purpose. Precisely, there is a help function already: https://github.com/tgingold/ghdlsynth-beta/blob/175123cda990ee2b5cfac461bd8ec44956da302a/src/ghdl.cc#L848-L863

This approach would solve most of possible licensing conflicts between yosys and any plugin that any third party might develop; such as distributing yosys with ghdl.so, verific.so, etc. Yosys allows to use any binary/module by having a very permissive license. The developers of each module decide how to build and distribute their parts, according to whatever license they might choose.

This issue is to request that yosys looks for modules (*.so on GNU/Linux) in the plugins directory and allows to use them implicitly, unless a conflict exists. I.e., users of verific or ghdl only would not need to specify the module to be used for VHDL sources. However, those that have both of them installed would be required to select one.

eine commented 4 years ago

@eddiehung, @daveshah1, @mmicko, would you mind providing a brief opinion? Is this feasible/interesting (although not prioritary)?

eddiehung commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion @eine. I have no opinion on this since I haven't worked with the plugin infrastructure; I think @cliffordwolf is the best person to ask.

whitequark commented 4 years ago

This approach would solve most of possible licensing conflicts between yosys and any plugin that any third party might develop; such as distributing yosys with ghdl.so, verific.so, etc. Yosys allows to use any binary/module by having a very permissive license. The developers of each module decide how to build and distribute their parts, according to whatever license they might choose.

There is already no such problem since the moment I added support for out-of-process frontends with connect_rpc. (But I'm still in favor of improving the plugin infrastructure, since it means better out-of-box experience for Yosys users.)

eine commented 4 years ago

@whitequark, I'm sorry but I don't understand what you mean. Which problem does not exist? Do you mean 'no licensing issues' or 'no conflict from having multiple frontends for the same language'?

whitequark commented 4 years ago

@eine No licensing issues.