Graphic shell for demo purposes/gSysC

[Vegh, Janos]

I recently found that graphic shell/extension. Is there any reason, why it was discontinued?

(I guess it is not very interesting for automation, verification, etc; but I guess it could be useful for demonstration/education;

especially when thinking in non-EDA utilization of SystemC)

The idea I liked, and also noticed that both Qt and SystemC versions are outdated. From QT side, it needs a complete rewrite, but possible.

Is there some basic change in SystemC that makes that approach (at least partly) unusable? If yes, is there and "porting guide" around?

 

[maehne]

The paper on gSysC suggests that it implements a loose coupling by only deriving from the corresponding SystemC ports and signals (Figure 3) and controlling the simulation by calls to sc_start() (section 4). Since the semantics of the ports, signals, and sc_start are still quite similar in IEEE Std 1666-2011 and its proof-of-concept implementation SystemC 2.3.3, it should not be too hard to update this coupling interface to SystemC. If I remember correctly SystemC 2.0.1 did not yet use namespaces and gSysC doesn't seem to use them either. Just using <systemc.h> instead of <systemc> may help, but once you know the coupling still works as intended, I would suggest to invest the effort to reference all SystemC classes with the proper namespace prefixes in the gSysC codebase and also move the gSysC implementation to an own namespace so that the potential for naming conflicts gets minimised.

I suspect that you will have to invest more effort on porting the code from Qt3 to Qt5.

You may consider contacting the authors of gSysC using the information on the gSysC homepage.

[Eyck]

Actually there might be a more versatile approach using Python as 'wrapper' and glue for SystemC. There was last year a paper at DVCon Europe about PySysC: http://events.dvcon.org/events/proceedings.aspx?id=278--2 (the repo can be found here: https://git.minres.com/SystemC/PySysC)

This allows to use wxWidget, gtk, or QT to interact with the SystemC simulation (the paper shows some prototype I wrote for internal use).