[myhdl-list] MyHDL hierarchy extraction and conversion process is broken

[Alexander H. <ale...@gm...>]

Hey guys

Sorry for the sensational subject. I do not really have the expertise
to really throw out such a statement. But I programmed quite a bit in
MyHDL now, and I _LOVE_ the approach. Using python as a HDL seems
pretty natural and great to achieve more flexibility. Also writing of
tests seems a lot more painless to me.

However, as often as I was happy about the great features MyHDL
offers, I am getting frustrated by completely misguiding error
messages for an unknown reason, where the only possible way to fix
them is spending many hours debugging through the MyHDL source code
and finding the relevant part which generates the exception. But even
when I got there, it is very difficult to find out how the MyHDL
conversion process got to this point and which line in my sourcecode
is relevant.

One example I recently tried to program was a flexible serial
receiver/transmitter, which takes a variable amount of 16-bit
arguments and transmits them on request using Xilinx's uart core. In
python I declared this module as

def communicator(rx, tx, ... , clk, *data)

However, this didn't work. I digged through the MyHDL conversion
process and let me say, even as a Python expert it is really painful
:-D

MyHDL uses a large mix of profiling, static code inspection and
runtime function inspection to determine the contained generators and
used signals. Due to this the conversion process jumps around
endlessly in the code, and precisely due to this mix (especially of
static source code inspection and the dynamic one) it is impossible to
use the great features which Python offers in terms of flexibility
(dynamic numbers of arguments until the conversion process starts,
code reuse by using classes, ...). Or at least it is not possible with
my deepness of understanding of MyHDL.

I know, this is some pretty blurry and not very constructive critics,
but my intuition tells me that there should be a lot more consistent
way of doing the conversion (ideally, only based on runtime
inspection) which allows such ways of programming increasing the
usefulness of MyHDL a lot. Even if it needs some additional function
call in each module to register signals or generators to the
converter.

In the hope I didn't insult anyone and I didn't reveal myself as a
complete moron because I forgot a simple MyHDL key concept, please
tell me your opinions or what I could do better? Unfortunately I
currently have another project which needs some progress, so I can't
commit a lot work to commiting code to MyHDL, but I really want to see
this project going to the next level :-)

Best,
Alex