pulsar

Pulsar is a high-level programming language for building hardware accelerators. Currently, I am working toward implementing a calyx backend. It is currently a very vanilla language because I have not yet determined how it should specialize (but all ADLs in practice are DSLs).

The syntax is a very blatant clone of Swift's with some modifications, and it's also very much a WIP.

func increment(x: Int) -> Int {
    return x + 1
}
func main() {
    let input = [1, 2, 3, 4]
    let output = map<1>(increment, input)
}

The compiler is tested e2e via verilator, a hardware simulation tool.

Crates

• pulsar-lang: Compiler driver
• pulsar-utils: Utilities for the pulsar-* crates
• pulsar-frontend: Parser/AST and type checking
• pulsar-ir: Structured and unstructured IR
• pulsar-backend: Target emission, e.g., Verilog (via calyx)