Initial idea was to remodel AssignW as Assign under Alway. Trying that
uncovered some issues, the most difficult of them was that a delay
attached to a continuous assignment behaves differently from a delay
attached to a blocking assignment statement, so we need to keep the
knowledge of which flavour an assignment was until V3Timing.
So instead of removing AstAssignW, we always wrap it in an AstAlways,
with a special `keyword()` type. This makes it into a proper procedural
statement, which is almost equivalent to AstAssign, except for the case
when they contain a delay. We still gain the benefits of #6280 and can
simplify some code. Every AstNodeStmt should now be under an
AstNodeProcedure - which we should rename to AstProcess, or an
AstNodeFTask). As a result, V3Table can now handle AssignW for free.
Also uncovered and fixed a bug in handling intra-assignment delays if
a function is present on the RHS of an AssignW.
There is more work to be done towards #6280, and potentially simplifying
AssignW handing, but this is the minimal change required to tick it off
the TODO list for #6280.
I stared this because the emitted makefiles for hierarchical verilation
were non-deterministic (iterating unordered_map indexed by pointers).
Then I realized that the V3HierPlan is just a dependency graph encoded
in a slightly idiosyncratic way. We do have a data structure to use for
that instead.
With that the output should always be deterministic + have nicer dumps.
This patch implements #6480. All loop statements are represented using
AstLoop and AstLoopTest.
This necessitates rework of the loop unroller to handle loops of
arbitrary form. To enable this, I have split the old unroller used for
'generate for' statements and moved it into V3Param, and subsequently
rewrote V3Unroll to handle the new representation. V3Unroll can now
unroll more complex loops, including with loop conditions containing
multiple variable references or inlined functions.
Handling the more generic code also requires some restrictions. If a
loop contains any of the following, it cannot be unrolled:
- A timing control that might suspend the loop
- A non-inlined call to a non-pure function
These constructs can change the values of variables in the loop, so are
generally not safe to unroll if they are present. (We could still unroll
if all the variables needed for unrolling are automatic, however we
don't do that right now.)
These restrictions seem ok in the benchmark suite, where the new
unroller can generally unroll many more loops than before.