[myhdl-list] MyHDL performance

[Martin d A. <po...@ma...>]

Hi,

I still hesitate to use MyHDL because of performance concerns for doing 
ASIC verification (I have close to zero interest in design). I have been 
using "a proprietary verification language" for quite some time now. 
Recognizing limitations of this proprietary solution, I've been exploring 
alternatives like C++ trusster.com, Digital Mars D StackThreads 
(assertfalse.com), Java Jove, and of course MyHDL for its ease of use.

For example I have run a benchmark using the MyHDL producer-consumer and 
the gray encoder in the documentation. The producer-consumer example is as 
fast as an equivalent implementation in "the proprietary language". The 
gray encoder is 10x slower, but I think the intbv is the bottleneck.

For code size, MyHDL producer-consumer beats the proprietary solution by a 
great margin, and for gray coding the code sizes are almost equal. I have 
not looked at memory footprint.

Do you think it is worth converting intbv or other aspects of MyHDL to C? 
Have you explored ways to speed up MyHDL (greenlet, stackless python - 
which is still active)?

Thanks,
Martin