[ANN] Ruby-VPI 21.1.0

[Suraj Kurapati]

Ruby-VPI is a Ruby interface to IEEE 1364-2005 Verilog VPI
and a platform for unit testing, rapid prototyping, and
systems integration of Verilog modules through Ruby. It
lets you create complex Verilog test benches easily and
wholly in Ruby.

http://ruby-vpi.rubyforge.org

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HTML version of this release announcement is available here:
http://snk.rubyforge.org/web/2008-08-02-ruby-vpi-21-1-0.html


Ruby-VPI 21.1.0

Contents

• 1 Features
• 2 Improvements

This release adds new compilation hooks, improves support
for Mentor Modelsim, simplifies the internal task
scheduler, and shortens the critical path of the C
extension.

1 Features

• Added CFLAGS_EXTRA and LDFLAGS_EXTRA environment
variables, which allow you to append to the default
CFLAGS and LDFLAGS with which your Ruby installation
was built.

Note that the CFLAGS and LDFLAGS environment variables
still behave the same way: they completely override the
defaults.

2 Improvements

• Attempted to fix spurious failures with Modelsim 6.2g
by advancing to the same time step[1] before applying
cache write operations.

• Replaced thread-based tasks with continuations (callcc)
in internal scheduler.

• Avoid some function calls on the C extension’s critical
path by storing/reusing return values.


[1] How can advancing the simulator by zero time steps solve
anything?

A time step is really composed of multiple time slots, so
advancing by zero time steps could, in fact, take us to any
future time slot withnin the current time step.

There are more details that I don’t care to explain here,
but in general, this technique seems to cure Modelsim 6.2g
by advancing it into a time slot where write operations can
be applied correctly.