Copyright - Yehowshua Immanuel

# A High performance, VCD Parser written in Rust

## Current Features
 - pretty fast, parses 3.04 GB VCD file in ~67s on M1 Macbook Air with 
   respect to 50s with GTKWave on the same device. FastWave currently
   offers highly robust error handling which GTKWave doesn't have.


# Current Limitations
Unable to handle VCD files that have signals with more than 
2^32 - 1 = 4,294,967,295 deltas/changes.

## Running

This repository comes with several smaller VCD files emitted from
various EDA tools. If you want a larger VCD file, grab one from
[here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pfm2qo2l8fGTHHJ8TLrg1vSGaV_TUbp2/view?usp=sharing).

The first build of the program may take some time.

``cargo run --release test-vcd-files/aldec/SPI_Write.vcd``

You can run all the tests with ``cargo test``

# Testing on Bad Files
You may wish to test the parser on a malformed VCD just to make
sure that the parser gives useful/sane errors.

Here's a command to test on a malformed VCD:
`cargo run --release test-vcd-files/VCD_file_with_errors.vcd`

Should work well on Linux. On MacOS, remove `release` for line numbers
in error, see
[here](https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/4490#issuecomment-1205611137).
`cargo run test-vcd-files/VCD_file_with_errors.vcd`

# TODO

## Features
 - [ ] re-order all signal timelines as binary balanced trees with respect to timestamps
       - support multithreaded re-ordering
 - [ ] Print out git commit or release number.
 - [ ] Should be able to load waveform whilst viewing it live.
       - could be quite challenging to implement for various reasons
 - [ ] Take a look at GTKWave parser to compare efficiency.

## Repairs
 - [ ] make a custom date parser for possibly up to 18 different versions(that is, for each possible tool).
 - [ ] Consolidate error messages and add cursors throughout.
 - [ ] Fix warnings especially usage and restriction warnings once I'm
       able to successfully parse all sample VCDs.

## Code Consistency
 - [ ] Change error messages to line and filenames. Go through all calls to ``format!`` whilst also keeping performance in mind.

## Marketing
 - [ ] Send survey to community channel.