Installing Hardcaml

Hardcaml can be installed with opam. We highly recommend using Hardcaml with OxCaml (a bleeding-edge OCaml compiler), which includes some Jane Street compiler extensions and maintains the latest version of Hardcaml; while still maintaining direct compatibility with existing OCaml code and libraries. Note that when looking at Hardcaml GitHub repositories, the OxCaml version is in a branch named oxcaml.

Install opam, the OxCaml compiler, and some basic developer tools to get started.

For additional information on setting up the OCaml toolchain and editor support, see Real World OCaml.

Once it's set up, make sure you have the current switch selected in your shell:

opam switch 5.2.0+ox

eval $(opam env)

Then, install the core Hardcaml libraries and some other libraries used in Hardcaml projects:

opam install -y hardcaml hardcaml_test_harness hardcaml_waveterm ppx_hardcaml

opam install -y core core_unix ppx_jane rope re dune

Building the Example Project

To build the project, clone this repository and then run the following command, which will build the generator binary (note the exe prefix is standard for OCaml, even on Unix systems), as well as building and running all of the tests.

dune build bin/generate.exe @runtest

To validate that the tests are running, try changing one of the input values in test_range_finder.ml and re-running the tests, to see if the printed values change. Once dune shows a diff in the tests, it can be accepted using the following command (this will modify the file in-place, so you may need to close and re-open it):

dune promote

For more on how expect-tests work, see this blog post

Viewing Waveforms

Hardcaml has two main ways to view waveforms:

• Exporting to a .hardcamlwaveform file, which, can be viewed using the Hardcaml terminal waveform viewer.

  • To try this, uncomment the waves_config definition that sets the format to Hardcamlwaveform, then run the tests again. The file should save into /tmp/ by default.
  • To run the viewer, hardcaml-waveform-viewer show file.hardcamlwaveform (if the command isn't available, make sure you've activated the opam switch in the same shell you're trying to run in, see above)
  • Some more details on using the viewer are available here

• Exporting to a .vcd file, which can be viewed using standard tools like GTKWave and Surfer

  • To try this, uncomment the waves_config definition that sets the format to Vcd, then run the tests again. The file should save into /tmp/ by default.

For small tests, waveforms can also be printed inline (as shown in test_range_finder.ml), which is useful for documenting and visualizing design behavior, albeit not as useful for interactive debugging.

Generating RTL

To generate RTL, run the compiled generate.exe binary, which will print the Verilog source:

bin/generate.exe range-finder

Note that dune should automatically copy the compiled binary into your source directory, but if it does not, all build products can be found in _build/default/.

Resources

• If you would like to run dune continuously to re-run tests every time a file is edited:

dune build --watch --terminal-persistence=clear-on-rebuild-and-flush-history bin/generate.exe @runtest

• Hardcaml documentation and further tutorials can be found here
• Real World OCaml is a free online book for learning OCaml
• The OCaml LSP and autoformatter can be used with VSCode, Emacs, and Vim, see instructions here