WAL the Waveform Analysis Language

Welcome to the Waveform Analysis Language (WAL) repository. This domain-specific language aims at enabling automated and sophisticated analysis of hardware waveforms. In WAL, hardware-specific things such as signals and simulation time are treated as first-class citizens of the language.

Installation

WAL is available from PyPi!

pip install wal-lang --user

On some systems, pip does not add WALs installation path to the PATH variable. If the "wal" command is not available after installation please add the installation path, e.g. ~/.local/bin on Ubuntu, to your PATH variable.

To get the latest development version of WAL you can clone this repository. After that install WAL by typing make install inside the cloned directory.

PyPy Support

WAL also supports the alternative Python implementation PyPy. PyPy comes with a Just-in-Time compiler leading to substantial speedups in a lot of scenarios. To run WAL with PyPy, clone the repository and call 'make install-pypy'. If you are using PyPy you must also install the python-dev package for PyPy3. On Ubuntu this package can be installed with 'sudo apt install pypy3-dev'.

Documentation

The WAL Programmer Manual is available on wal-lang.org.

Examples

To get an impression of WAL you can check out basic examples. Also this ASCII cast ASCII Cast, shows how the WAL REPL is used to compare two RISCV cores.

A more sophisticated RISC-V core comparison is described here and the WAL code to this publication can be found here.

WAWK

WAWK is a project building on top of the WAL language. It combines the waveform analysis of WAL with the programming Style of AWK. Internally, WAWK is transpiled to WAL expressions, showcasing how new languages can be build on top of WAL.

Publication

The initial paper on WAL was presented at ASPDAC'22 and can be downloaded here: https://www.ics.jku.at/files/2022ASPDAC_WAL.pdf. The examples from the paper can be found in the examples folder.

If you like WAL you can cite our paper as follows:

@InProceedings{KG:2022,
  author        = {Lucas Klemmer and Daniel Gro{\ss}e},
  title         = {{WAL:} A Novel Waveform Analysis Language for Advanced Design Understanding and Debugging},
  booktitle     = {ASP Design Automation Conf.},
  year          = 2022
}

Emacs Mode

A basic major mode for Emacs is available here.