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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
notypes@discuss.systems ("Rachit") wrote:
People keep asking me what the "Rust for hardware design" would look like. Those who know their PL history know that, before we could build Rust, we had to define ideas like "Memory Safety".
A hopefully uncontroversial take is that Memory safety defines a class of *logical errors* that pointer-manipulating programs suffer from. By defining this category, we were able to create dynamic and static mechanisms to eliminate it.
Building a "Rust for hardware design" requires the same so I spent the weekend writing a 2-page paper defining a criteria for "safe hardware description languages (HDLs)". Instead of competing with heavyweight formal tools, safe HDLs should complement them by eliminating a category of bugs that exist in *all hardware designs* and let the formal tools focus on design-specific properties.
Would love to hear what people think: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/files/pubs/safe-hdls.pdf