Hacker | Engineer

I met with my advisor for the project, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, today to officially kick off my independent study this semester for Computer.Build. We mapped out some milestones, discussed some implementation ideas, and went over a couple of books. It’s time to get started for real.

I’m already making significant headway, with some basic VHDL code generation from both Ruby and Clojure and a simple multiplexer implemented in each. I’m about half way done building the state machine generator in Clojure, and once that’s finished the Ruby version shouldn’t be too much more work. I think the milestones we came up with are pretty solid, and I’m sure I can get things done on time.

My advisor suggested that I focus on getting most of the code written before the middle of the semester, so I have the rest of the time to test, tweak, debug, and write. I think this is a great approach, and the schedule we came up with to fit it seems quite doable.

Milestones (divide and conquer)

• 1/4 done (February 21): State machines working in both languages, and plan for implementation of computer generation
• 1/2 done (March 21): Simple computer successfully generated
• 3/4 done (April 18): TBD
• end of semester (May 16): Paper written comparing the two implementations, and a computer generated from each running successfully in an FPGA

Books

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

This book got me really excited. My class this semester on Advanced Computer Hardware design requires no books, so I had no idea this even existed. It pretty much walks through the entire process of building a computer, all the way from gates to operating systems. My advisor let me borrow it for the entire semester! This is going to be a great reference and resource for figuring out how to put the pieces together.

Programming Languages: A grand tour

When I started talking about language stuff, which half of this project is, my advisor jumped up and started looking for his copy of this book. He couldn’t find it, but it sounds like a pretty useful thing to have. It’s basically a collection of all of the major papers about programming languages in the last few decades.