The _CONST suffix on these macros is only lexical notation, pointer
constness can be preserved by overloading the underlying
implementations appropriately. Given that the compiler will catch
invalid const usage (trying to assign a non-const pointer to a const
pointer variable, etc.), and that the declarations of symbols should
make their constness obvious, I see no reason to keep the _CONST
flavours.
Fail at compile time if the result of these macros can be statically
determined (i.e.: they aways succeed or always fail). Remove unnecessary
casts discovered. No functional change.
This patch implements #3032. Verilator creates a module representing the
SystemVerilog $root scope (V3LinkLevel::wrapTop). Until now, this was
called the "TOP" module, which also acted as the user instantiated model
class. Syms used to hold a pointer to this root module, but hold
instances of any submodule. This patch renames this root scope module
from "TOP" to "$root", and introduces a separate model class which is
now an interface class. As the root module is no longer the user
interface class, it can now be made an instance of Syms, just like any
other submodule. This allows absolute references into the root module to
avoid an additional pointer indirection resulting in a potential speedup
(about 1.5% on OpenTitan). The model class now also contains all non
design specific generated code (e.g.: eval loops, trace config, etc),
which additionally simplifies Verilator internals.
Please see the updated documentation for the model interface changes.
What previously used to be per module static constants created in
V3Table and V3Prelim are now merged globally within the whole model and
emitted as part of a separate constant pool. Members of the constant
pool are global variables which are declared lazily when used (similar to
loose methods).
Wilson Snyder
Adrien Le Masle
Geza Lore
Udi Finkelstein