Overview

This repository contains a fast VHDL language server and analysis library written in Rust.

The speed makes the tool very pleasant to use since it loads projects really fast and does not consume a lot of ram. A 200.000 line VHDL project is analyzed in 160 ms on my Desktop using 8 cores and only consumes 180 MByte of RAM when loaded.

I very much appreciate help from other people especially regarding semantic analysis of VHDL. You do not need to be a programmer to help, it is even more helpful to interpret and clarify the VHDL standard and provide minimal examples and describe how they should work according to the standard. Further information about contributing can be found by reading the Contributors Guide

Contributors

• Maintainer: Lukas Scheller
• Founder: Olof Kraigher

Projects

VHDL Language Server

Goals

• A complete VHDL language server protocol implementation with diagnostics, navigate to symbol, find all references etc.

Features

• Live syntax and type checking
• Checks for missing and duplicate declarations
• Supports goto-definition/declaration (also in presence of overloading)
• Supports find-references (also in presence of overloading)
• Supports goto-implementation
  • From component declaration to matching entity by default binding
  • From entity to matching component declaration by default binding
• Supports hovering symbols
• Rename symbol
• Find workspace symbols
• View/find document symbols

When Installing it from Crate

When installing the VHDL_LS from crates.io the required
vhdl_libraries directory will not be installed automatically and
will need to be copied into the parent directory of the VHDL_LS binary manually.

Trying it out

A language server is never used directly by the end user and it is integrated into different editor plugins. The ones I know about are listed here.

Use in VSCode

https://github.com/Bochlin/rust_hdl_vscode

Use in emacs

VHDL LS has built-in support by emacs lsp-mode since 2020-01-04.

It can be set up automatically by installing the package vhdl-ext and adding the following snippet to your config:

(require 'vhdl-ext)
(vhdl-ext-mode-setup)
(vhdl-ext-eglot-set-server 've-rust-hdl) ;`eglot' config
(vhdl-ext-lsp-set-server 've-rust-hdl)   ; `lsp' config

Installation for Neovim

Automatic Installation

You can install rust_hdl automatically in Neovim using :Mason. Within Mason, the package is called rust_hdl. If you don't have :Mason, you can simply install the binary as previously described.

Automatic Configuration using nvim-lspconfig

nvim-lspconfig has a built in configuration for vhdl_ls

In order to configure it, simply add

lspconfig = require('lspconfig')
lspconfig['vhdl_ls'].setup({
  on_attach = on_attach,
  capabilities = capabilities
})

Manual Configuration using Neovim's built in client

Neovim provides an LSP client to the VHDL_LS language server. Download the
VHDL_LS release. The binary must be on the path and executable (if you can run
"vhdl_ls -h" in the terminal then you're good).

In your Neovim config.lua add the following:

function STARTVHDLLS()
  vim.lsp.start({
    name = 'vhdl_ls',
    cmd = {'vhdl_ls'},
  })
end
vim.api.nvim_set_keymap('n', '<F5>', ':lua STARTVHDLLS()<CR>', { noremap = true, silent = true })

Using the example above, pressing F5 while inside Neovim starts the language
server. There are also other options, like automatically starting it when
opening a certain file type, see the Neovim LSP documentation for more.

Configuration

The language server needs to know your library mapping to perform full analysis of the code. For this it uses a configuration file in the TOML format named vhdl_ls.toml.

vhdl_ls will load configuration files in the following order of priority (first to last):

1. A file named .vhdl_ls.toml in the user home folder.
2. A file name from the VHDL_LS_CONFIG environment variable.
3. A file named vhdl_ls.toml in the workspace root.

Settings in a later files overwrites those from previously loaded files.

Define the VHDL revision to use for parsing and analysis with the standard key. The expected value is the year associated the VHDL standard. Supported standards are 1993, 2008 and 2019 where both the long version ("2008") and the short version ("08") can be used. If nothing is specified, 2008 is used.

[!NOTE] Defining the standard feature is a relatively new feature (since april 2024). Anything but the 2008 standard will not change much at the moment.

Example vhdl_ls.toml

# What standard to use. This is optional and defaults to VHDL2008.
standard = "2008"
# File names are either absolute or relative to the parent folder of the vhdl_ls.toml file
[libraries]
lib2.files = [
    'pkg2.vhd',
]
lib1.files = [
    'pkg1.vhd',
    'tb_ent.vhd'
]

# Wildcards are supported
lib3.files = [
    'test/*.vhd',
    'src/*.vhd',
    'src/*/*.vhd',
]

# Libraries can be marked as third-party to disable some analysis warnings, such as unused declarations
UNISIM.files = [
    'C:\Xilinx\Vivado\2023.1\data\vhdl\src\unisims\unisim_VCOMP.vhd',
]
UNISIM.is_third_party = true

[lint]
unused = 'error' # Upgrade the 'unused' diagnostic to the 'error' severity
unnecessary_work_library = false # Disable linting for the 'library work;' statement

Using the lint table, you can configure the severity of diagnostics or turn of diagnostics altogether.

[!WARNING] You can overwrite every diagnostic error code including syntax or analysis errors using the lint table. However, the intended use-case is for lints only. Overwriting syntax or analysis errors (e.g., error codes unused or syntax) can cause unwanted side effects

Paths in the vhdl_ls.toml can contain glob patterns (i.e., .../*/). On Unix machines, they can contain environment variables using the $NAME or ${NAME} syntax. On Windows machines, use the %NAME% syntax to substitute environment variables.

As an LSP-client developer how should I integrate VHDL-LS?

I recommend that the lsp-client polls GitHub and downloads the latest VHDL-LS release from GitHub.

VHDL-LS has frequent releases and the automatic update ensures minimal maintenance for the lsp-client developer as well as ensuring the users are not running and outdated version.

VHDL Language Frontend

Goals

• This project aims to provide a fully featured open source VHDL frontend that is easy to integrate into other tools.
• A design goal of the frontend is to be able to recover from syntax errors such that it is useful for building a language server.
• Analysis order must be automatically computed such that the user does not have to maintain a compile order.
• Comments will be part of the AST to support document generation.
• Separate parsing from semantic analysis to allow code formatting on non-semantically correct code.

Building the project locally

1. Make sure that you have the Rust toolchain installed. This repository always follows the latest toolchain in the stable channel.
2. Run cargo install --path vhdl_lang to install the language frontend. Run instead cargo install --path vhdl_ls to install the language server.
3. Make sure that the default libraries are available at a visible path. Search paths are, for example, /usr/lib/rust_hdl/vhdl_libraries or /usr/local/lib/rust_hdl/vhdl_libraries.
4. Run the command vhdl_lang or vhdl_ls to run the language front-end binary or the language server

Testing the Language Server

For checking the language server, rust_hdl_vscode is recommended. To instruct the extension to use the new binary, instead of a downloaded one, go to the extension settings and set the Language server location to systemPath. To specify the exact path, set it to user and set Language Server User Path to the path that points to the vhdl_ls binary.