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.
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++.
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 \
libghc-split-dev
The second command will install the Haskell libraries regex-compat, syb,
old-time, and split, 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 must be 7.10.1 or greater. Beyond that, any version will work, since the source code has been written with extensive preprocessor macros, to support every minor release since. BSC builds with the latest version at the time of this writing, which is 8.8.2.
For building the Bluespec Tcl/Tk shell, you will need the tcl, tk,
fontconfig and Xft libraries:
$ apt-get install \
tcl-dev \
tk-dev \
libfontconfig1-dev \
libx11-dev \
libxft-dev
The tcl shell also requires the itcl and itk libraries. For Debian 8,
Debian 9, Ubuntu 16.04, and Ubuntu 18.04 version 3.4 of these libraries
are available:
$ apt-get install \
itcl3-dev \
itk3-dev
For Debian 10 and later, and Ubuntu 19.04 and later, version 4 is available and the package names have been changed:
$ apt-get install \
tk-itcl4-dev \
tk-itk4-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 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
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
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.
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
BLUESPECDIRbe 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.
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.