Bluespec Compiler

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Compiler, simulator, and tools for the Bluespec Hardware Description Language. Bluespec is a single language for hardware designs that comes in two syntactic flavors, which are interchangeable:

Bluespec SystemVerilog (BSV)
Bluespec Haskell (BH, or "Bluespec Classic")

Bluespec is a high-level hardware description language. It has a variety of advanced features including a powerful type system that can prevent errors prior to synthesis time, and its most distinguishing feature, Guarded Atomic Actions, allow you to define hardware components in a modular manner based on their invariants, and let the compiler pick a scheduler.

The toolchain was under development by Bluespec Inc for almost 20 years, and has been proven repeatedly in production designs like Flute, Piccolo, and Shakti.

The Bluespec compiler bsc emits standard Verilog for maximum compatibility with any synthesis toolchain and comes with an included simulator ("bluesim"), standard library, and TCL scripting support ("bluetcl").

NOTE: The current release is minimal, and more code will be made available in the future, including:

Test suite

Documentation (User Guide)

Graphical development environment

The repository is still evolving. We welcome your feedback, issue reports, and pull requests.

A separate repository, bsc-contrib, exists for sharing libraries and utilities that don't (or don't yet) belong in the core tools.

Compiling BSC from source

Binaries for the Bluespec toolchain are currently unavailable, so you must build them from source code. The source code can currently be built on Linux and MacOS. It may compile for other flavors of Unix, but likely will need additional if/else blocks in source code or Makefiles.

The core of BSC is written in Haskell, with some libraries in C/C++.

Install the Haskell compiler (GHC)

You will need the standard Haskell compiler ghc which is available for Linux, MacOS and Windows, along with some additional Haskell libraries. These are available as standard packages in most Linux distributions. For example, on Debian and Ubuntu systems, you can say:

$ apt-get install ghc
$ apt-get install \
    libghc-regex-compat-dev \
    libghc-syb-dev \
    libghc-old-time-dev

The second command will install the Haskell libraries regex-compat, syb, and old-time, as well as some libraries that they depend on.

You can do the analogous package-install on other Linux distributions using their native package mechanisms, and use Macports on Apple OS X. Full details can be found at https://www.haskell.org/. On some systems, you may need to use the cabal command to install Haskell libraries:

$ apt-get install cabal-install
$ cabal install regex-compat syb old-time

The version of GHC should not matter, since the source code has been written with extensive preprocessor macros, to support nearly every minor release since as far back as 6.12 and earlier. BSC builds with the latest version at the time of this writing, which is 8.8.2.

Additional requirements

For building the Bluespec Tcl/Tk shell, you will need the fontconfig and Xft libraries:

$ apt-get install \
    libfontconfig1-dev \
    libx11-dev \
    libxft-dev

Building BSC also requires standard Unix shell and Makefile utilities.

The repository for the Yices SMT Solver is cloned as a submodule of this repository. Building the BSC tools will recurse into this directory and build the Yices library for linking into BSC and Bluetcl. Yices currently requires the gperf perfect hashing library to compile:

$ apt-get install gperf

Building the BSC tools will also recurse into a directory for the STP SMT solver. This is currently an old snapshot of the STP source code, including the code for various libraries that it uses. In the future, this may be replaced with a submodule instantiation of the repository for the STP SMT solver. When that happens, additional requirements from that repository will be added. The current snapshot requires Perl, to generate two source files. It also needs flex and bison:

$ apt-get install flex bison

The check target runs a test using an external Verilog simulator, which is Icarus Verilog by default. You can install Icarus on Debian/Ubuntu with:

$ apt-get install iverilog

Clone the repository

Clone this repository by running:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc

That will clone this respository and all of the submodules that it depends on. If you have cloned the repository without the --recursive flag, you can setup the submodules later with a separate command:

$ git clone https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc
$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Build and test the toolchain

At the root of the repository:

$ make all
$ make check

This will create a directory called inst containing an installation of the compiler toolchain. It will then run a smoke test to ensure the compiler and simulator work properly. This inst directory can later be moved to another location; the tools do not hard-code the install location.

If you wish, you can install into another location by assigning the variable PREFIX in the environment:

$ make PREFIX=/tools/bluespec

Choosing a Verilog simulator

The Makefile in examples/smoke_test shows how you can point the default check target at other Verilog simulators such as VCS and VCSI (Synopys), NC-Verilog & NCsim (Cadence), ModelSim (Mentor), and CVC.

Many people also use Verilator to compile and simulate bsc-generated Verilog -- but you must write your own C++ harness for your design in order to use it.

Using the Bluespec compiler

The installation contains a bin directory. To run the BSC tools, you only need to add the bin directory to your path (or provide that path on the command line). The executables in that directory will expect to find other files in sibling directories within that same parent installation directory. If you just built the compiler, you can quickly test it like so:

$ export PATH=$(pwd)/inst/bin:$PATH

NOTE: Earlier versions of BSC required that the environment variable BLUESPECDIR be set to point into the installation directory; this is no longer necessary, as the executables will figure out their location and determine the installation location on their own.

Run the following to see command-line options on the executable:

$ bsc -help

Additional flags of use to developers can be displayed with the following command:

$ bsc -help-hidden

More details on using BSC, Bluesim, and Bluetcl can be found in the User Guide (forthcoming). Training and tutorials can be found in the BSVlang repository.

License

The Bluespec toolchain is available under the BSD license. The source code also includes several other components under various license agreements (all of it open/copyleft software). See COPYING for copyright and license details.

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