Spade 0.2.0

6 weeks have passed, so it is time for another Spade release! A lot of my time has been spent at or preparing for conferences, so there are no huge changes this time, but quite a few convenience features.

Memory Initial Content🔗

The standard library has been extended with another function: std::mem::clocked_memory_init. Like its sibling clocked_memory, it defines a memory which can be read by read_memory, but this one also allows specifying initial content of the memory.

This can be used to build ROMs if no write ports are specified, or RAMs with initial content if the available memories support it.

let rom = clocked_memory_init$(
    clk,
    writes: [],
    initial: [1,2,3,4]
);
reg(clk) rom_out = read_mem(rom, addr);

More arithmetic ops🔗

This release adds min, max and order functions to the standard library under the std::ops namespace, and the != operator to the core language.

(Hacky) literals🔗

An issue that has been plaguing the language for a while is a lack of support for large or negative integer literals. For example, the following code failed to compile

let x: int<8> = -128

This is clearly not intentional, and has been fixed.

In a related issue, the following code also failed to compile

let x: int<8> = 128

While this is incorrect code since 128 does not fit in an 8-bit integer, Spade does not currently have an unsigned type and some features such as array indices treat signed integers as unsigned. This means that code like

let array = [1,2,3,4];
let value = array[3];

fails to compile. Until Spade gets a proper unsigned type, you can now suffix integer literals with u, making the following code work

let array = [1,2,3,4];
let value = array[3u];

It is worth pointing out that this is only an integer literal representation change, so using u for anything but index-like operations will fail. For example,

let x: int<8> = 1;
let y: int<8> = 150u;
x > y

will evaluate to false.

Standard Library in Stand-alone Projects🔗

Previously, the standard library was included by swim when compiling projects. But this meant that one had to manually include the standard library when running the spade compiler in stand-alone mode without swim.

As of this version, spade now includes the standard library and prelude itself, allowing its use without swim.

Note: If you use an old swim with a new spade, or vice versa, you will see errors when building swim projects. Make sure to update both or neither.

Error message improvements🔗

After 4 years of resistance, my advisor has finally written some Rust! Among other things, he made numerous improvements to the grammar and clarity of the error messages coming out of the compiler.

Publications🔗

I managed to visit 2 workshops in the last month: Latte'23 and OSDA. If you want to see the papers or presentations, check the publication list at https://spade-lang.org/#publications