Emission (Emit) Dialect Rationale

This document describes various design points of the emit dialect, why it is the way it is, and current status. This follows in the spirit of other MLIR Rationale docs.

Introduction ¶

The emit dialects controls the structure and formatting of the files emitted from CIRCT. It captures information about both SystemVerilog output files and generic collateral files. The ops are translated to output files in ExportVerilog. Presently, the dialect is intertwined with SystemVerilog - it can reference items in a design through symbols to emit references to them through SystemVerilog names in the output.

Operations ¶

The dialect is centred around the emit.file operation which groups a list of statements in its body, responsible for producing the contents of the file. The emit.file_list operation pins down a list of references to emitted files and outputs a file list file enumerating the paths to them. Together, these operations represent the SV and collateral output of CIRCT.