Compiler, simulator, and tools for the Bluespec Hardware Description Language. Bluespec is a single language for hardware designs that comes in two syntactic flavors, which are interchangeable:
- Bluespec SystemVerilog (BSV)
- Bluespec Haskell (BH, or "Bluespec Classic")
Bluespec is a high-level hardware description language. It has a variety of advanced features including a powerful type system that can prevent errors prior to synthesis time, and its most distinguishing feature, Guarded Atomic Actions, allow you to define hardware components in a modular manner based on their invariants, and let the compiler pick a scheduler.
The toolchain was under development by Bluespec Inc for almost 20 years, and has been proven repeatedly in production designs like Flute, Piccolo, and Shakti.
The Bluespec compiler bsc emits standard Verilog for maximum compatibility
with any synthesis toolchain and comes with an included simulator ("bluesim"),
standard library, and TCL scripting support ("bluetcl").
The repository is still evolving. We welcome your feedback, issue reports, and pull requests.
A separate repository, bsc-contrib, exists for sharing libraries and utilities that don't (or don't yet) belong in the core tools.
A graphical environment for using BSC is available in a separate bdw repository. BDW (the BSC Development Workstation) provides a number of tools, including the ability to view simulation waveforms as source-level values.
To receive announcements about BSC and related projects, subscribe to [email protected].
For questions and discussion about BSC source, subscribe to the developers' mailing list [email protected].
For any questions or discussion about Bluespec HDLs, using BSC, or related projects, subscribe to [email protected].
IRC users might try joining the #bluespec channel on FreeNode.
There's also a bluespec tag on StackOverflow.
And we've enabled the Discussions tab in this GitHub repo. This is a new feature to support discussion within the project itself. Feel free to give it a try and see if it can be useful to our community.
Binaries for the Bluespec toolchain are currently unavailable, so you must build them from source code. The source code can currently be built on Linux and MacOS. It may compile for other flavors of Unix, but likely will need additional if/else blocks in source code or Makefiles.
The core of BSC is written in Haskell, with some libraries in C/C++.
You will need the standard Haskell compiler ghc which is available for Linux,
macOS and Windows, along with some additional Haskell libraries. These are
available as standard packages in most Linux distributions. For example, on
Debian and Ubuntu systems, you can say:
$ apt-get install ghc
$ apt-get install \
libghc-regex-compat-dev \
libghc-syb-dev \
libghc-old-time-dev \
libghc-split-dev
The second command will install the Haskell libraries regex-compat, syb,
old-time, and split, as well as some libraries that they depend on.
If you wish to do profiling builds of the compiler itself, you will also need to install versions of the Haskell libraries built using the profiling flags. On Debian and Ubuntu, this can be done with:
$ apt-get install \
ghc-prof \
libghc-regex-compat-prof \
libghc-syb-prof \
libghc-old-time-prof \
libghc-split-prof
You can do the analogous package-install on other Linux distributions using
their native package mechanisms, and on macOS using Homebrew or Macports. Full details
can be found at https://www.haskell.org/, and in particular ghcup is a popular
installer for recent Haskell releases https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/.
On some systems, you may need to use the cabal command to install Haskell
libraries. This tool is installed by ghcup but is also available as a package
for many distributions.
If you are using cabal 3.0 or later, you will need to use the legacy v1-
commands to install Haskell libraries.
For cabal v2.x:
$ cabal update
$ cabal install regex-compat syb old-time split
For cabal v3.x:
$ cabal update
$ cabal v1-install regex-compat syb old-time split
Bluespec compiler builds are tested with GHC 7.10.1 and greater, and older GHC releases are not supported.
Beyond that, any version up to 8.10.1 (the latest at the time of writing) will work, since the source code has been written with extensive preprocessor macros to support every minor release since.
For building and using the Bluespec Tcl shell (bluetcl),
you will need the tcl library:
$ apt-get install tcl-dev
Building BSC also requires standard Unix shell and Makefile utilities.
The repository for the Yices SMT Solver is
cloned as a submodule of this repository. Building the BSC tools will recurse
into this directory and build the Yices library for linking into BSC and
Bluetcl. Yices currently requires autoconf and the gperf perfect hashing
library to compile:
$ apt-get install \
autoconf \
gperf
Building the BSC tools will also recurse into a directory for the STP SMT solver. This is currently an old snapshot of the STP source code, including the code for various libraries that it uses. In the future, this may be replaced with a submodule instantiation of the repository for the STP SMT solver. When that happens, additional requirements from that repository will be added. The current snapshot requires Perl, to generate two source files. It also needs flex and bison:
$ apt-get install flex bison
The check target runs a test using an external Verilog simulator, which is
Icarus Verilog by default. You can install Icarus on Debian/Ubuntu with:
$ apt-get install iverilog
The install-doc target builds PDF documentation from LaTeX source files
that rely on a few standard style files. The following Debian/Unbuntu
packages install sufficient tools to build the documentation:
$ apt-get install \
texlive-latex-base \
texlive-latex-recommended \
texlive-latex-extra \
texlive-font-utils \
texlive-fonts-extra
Clone this repository by running:
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc
That will clone this repository and all of the submodules that it depends on.
If you have cloned the repository without the --recursive flag, you can setup
the submodules later with a separate command:
$ git clone https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
At the root of the repository:
$ make install
$ make check
This will create a directory called inst containing an installation of the
compiler toolchain. It will then run a smoke test to ensure the compiler and
simulator work properly. This inst directory can later be moved to another
location; the tools do not hard-code the install location.
If you wish, you can install into another location by assigning the variable
PREFIX in the environment:
$ make PREFIX=/tools/bluespec
An unoptimized, debug, or profiling build can be done using one of:
$ make BSC_BUILD=NOOPT
$ make BSC_BUILD=DEBUG
$ make BSC_BUILD=PROF
For more extensive testing, see the testsuite README
in the testsuite subdirectory.
The Makefile in examples/smoke_test shows how you can point the default
check target at other Verilog simulators such as VCS and VCSI (Synopys),
NC-Verilog & NCsim (Cadence), ModelSim (Mentor), and CVC.
Many people also use Verilator to compile and simulate bsc-generated
Verilog -- but you must write your own C++ harness for your design in order to
use it.
To build and install the PDF documentation, you can add the following:
$ make install-doc
This will install into the same inst or PREFIX directory.
The installed documents include the BSC User Guide and the BSC Libraries
Reference Guide.
The installation contains a bin directory. To run the BSC tools, you only
need to add the bin directory to your path (or provide that path on the
command line). The executables in that directory will expect to find other
files in sibling directories within that same parent installation directory. If
you just built the compiler, you can quickly test it like so:
$ export PATH=$(pwd)/inst/bin:$PATH
NOTE: Earlier versions of BSC required that the environment variable
BLUESPECDIRbe set to point into the installation directory; this is no longer necessary, as the executables will figure out their location and determine the installation location on their own.
Run the following to see command-line options on the executable:
$ bsc -help
Additional flags of use to developers can be displayed with the following command:
$ bsc -help-hidden
More details on using BSC, Bluesim, and Bluetcl can be found in the User Guide (built in this repository). Training and tutorials can be found in the BSVlang repository.
The Bluespec toolchain is provided by Bluespec Inc and
available under the BSD-3-Clause license.
The source code also includes several other components under
various license agreements (all of it open/copyleft software).
See COPYING for copyright and license details.