[openhw.core-v.sw] IDE and HW Model

[Alexander Fedorov <alexander.fedorov@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I would like to start discussion about IDE and HW [meta]model.

I believe that IDE cannot be really useful without rich information (or 
"metadata") about target hardware. With my good friends I did several 
experiments with "hardware metadata"-based IDE scenarios and found that 
knowledge about "underlying hardware" always brings the user 
productivity to another level. The problem we have not yet solved is a 
lack of unified terminology to describe hardware capabilities to an IDE 
user - I hope OpenHW group will address this challenge. All the rest is 
more or less clear and not really bound to a particular software 
platform: the "metadata schema" (that is practically equal to "DSL 
grammar") can be supported on variety of platforms (Eclipse CDT, Eclipse 
Theia, VSCode, others).

I'm not talking about "front-end" languages support to program hardware 
first (C/C++/Rust/any others), because it becomes secondary problem with 
properly tuned toolchains. And toolchains can be tuned much more 
effectively if we know target "hardware metadata". The same for "debug" 
experience - the most important and tricky settings for debug connection 
can be derived from "hardware metamodel". Moreover, "classic" IDE 
features may be supported to acceptable level with the help of LSP/DAP 
components reuse, and these components are also tuned with the 
information derived from hardware metadata.

So, the HW metadata is a key ingredient to animate HW with SW using 
IDE&Tools.
The suggestion is to establish a dedicated repository to start working 
on HM metamodel definition that will be consumable by both tools and humans.

Regards,
AF