Visualization Backend Proposal

[sgpthomas]

This is a proposal for adding a backend to generate GraphViz files from fuse programs. The very high level idea is to represent data and control flow through a program in a layout that's reminiscent of circuit diagrams.

Declarations are represented as blocks with name and type. For array values, we display name, type, and number of banks:

For loops: Array access form a sort of mux, array writes are a sort of demux We can display offsets of the iterator variable on the edge from the control node that represents the iterator. corresponds to:

decl a: bit<32>[4 bank 4];
decl b: bit<32>[4 bank 4];

for (let i = 0..4) unroll 4{
  b[i] := a[i];
}

I don't know about while loops

Parallel sequencing is trivial, you just don't do anything special Linear sequencing will require some sort of registers between stages

[sampsyo]

Cool! This is a tiny, superficial thing, but it occurs to me that it might be perfectly legible—and a little more compact—to combine the name and type "blocks" in an array representation. The top block could just say "a : int32" instead of having two blocks, one that says "a" and another for "int32."

[rachitnigam]

Also, something to note about pretty printing:

1. The toString method for Type is already overloaded so doing something like s"${pretty(expr)}: $t" will do the right thing.
2. It would be worth defining a separate PrettySyntax.scala file that pretty prints AST nodes for the diagrams to reduce the noise from the big blocks (EArrAccess(...) would just become a[i])