Re: [myhdl-list] MyHDL performance

[David B. <da...@we...>]

Martin d Anjou wrote:
> 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
> 

As a general point for speeding up python, have you used psyco?  It 
doesn't work for all kinds of code, but for some things it can make a 
big difference.  Another point is that some operations are significantly 
faster in python 2.5.  If you haven't tried these two, then they will 
maybe give you an easy speed up.