Disclaimer

PROPRIETARY - Copyright - Yehowshua Immanuel

The Beginnings of a high-performance, low memory footprint VCD Viewer in Rust for massive multi-GB waveforms

Current Features

• very fast
• loads 400MB of VCD waveform per second on an 8 core 2017 desktop CPU with NVMe storage
• consumes roughly between 10 - 50MB of memory per GB of waveform

Planned Features

• elegant/pretty UI
• can be easily ported to work in browser via webassembly
• allows high-performance custom Rust plugins to manipulate and generate new waveforms live

Running

Make sure you have a test vcd file to get you started. You can grab a large VCD file from here.

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

TODO

• make a custon date parser for possibly up to 18 different versions(that is, for each possible tool).

• Fix warning especially usage and restriction warnings once I'm able to successfully parse all sample VCDs.

• Should be able to load waveform whilst viewing it live. - could be quite challenging to implement for various reasons

• Consolidate error messages and add cursors throughout.

• Consider what to do with don't care values will probably just convert them to strings for now.

• Include line and possible column numbers

• Take a look at GTKWave parser to compare effificiency.

• Send survey to community channel.

Questions to Answer

• Is it safe to assume that we may treat any values before the first non-zero timestamp as having occured on #0?

Probably No Longer Needed

• Should insert nodes in BFS order