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rdaly525 / coreir

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Basic Coreir library proposal #716

Open rdaly525 opened 5 years ago

rdaly525 commented 5 years ago

What problems am I trying to solve? -Better and safer mechanism for utilizing external libraries in coreir -Ability to define and create multiple library implementations for coreir libraries. -Link different implementations for the same library in a non-adhoc way.

Proposal: -Separate the concept of a library and a library implementation. -A library defines all the modules and generators (including typegens) for that particular library stored in a Namespace. -An implementation fills in the definition or other metadata for all (or a subset) of the modules/generators defined in a library -Store all external libraries in an organized directory (similar to something like rust crates) -Embed external library requirements in json file so that these libraries can be loaded before deserializing the rest of the json file -API for "linking" library implementations

Possible Issues -Using the dynamic library approach for both libraries and implementations is unsafe as either can edit anything in the entire CoreIR context. -Possibly wanting to load multiple implementations for the same library -Link-time dependencies. What happens when a library implementation requires another library

Future features not in this proposal. -submodules -safer linking aka isolating the library/implementation from the full coreir context. -Specifying libraries using a script and/or Magma instead of dynamic libraries -Versioning libraries and library implementations

rdaly525 commented 5 years ago

@leonardt, it would be great to get your thoughts on this.