MorphoHDL: A minimalistic language for growing circuits

67 points by jacktang 8 hours ago on hackernews | 8 comments

hosel | 7 hours ago

The visualizations are stunning!

bbminner | 4 hours ago

Honestly this is the first time I am seeing this kind of work that i genuinely like. Most fractal and other kinds of self repeating results are not that interesting at all to me.

amoshebb | 4 hours ago

Not really an HDL, as currently it has no concept of actually connecting the nodes. Each edge is an arbitrary number of conductors with no constraints on routing or timing. Curious to see where this goes though

light_hue_1 | 2 hours ago

This is the view of an HLD that someone without any actual HLD experience would have.

jy14898 | 2 hours ago

> Although logic connectivity is not layout-dependent in the current prototype, we envision a future where physical proximity directly influences or determines logical connections. In this ultimate view, the circuit behaves like a digital organism whose physical form and logical connections evolve together under local structural constraints.

lefra | an hour ago

Once any HDL is translated to a bunch of primitives (gates, LUTs, flip-flops, etc), that's the job of an automated place-and-route, which already exist. It's independent of the starting language.

freakynit | 4 hours ago

I made this comment a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668760

Is this kinda similar in nature?

lefra | an hour ago

The graphs are beautiful, however they're independent of the language (because they're a visualization of the resulting gates). You could get the same graphs from VHDL or Verilog.

I don't like the "fallback" mechanism, because it will be used when "something goes wrong", without being specific about exactly under what conditions should the fallback happen. Maybe I made a mistake, "something" fails at a step I didn't expect, and this will silently implement in a way I didn't mean (maybe the result is even correct, just using way more gates than needed).