Programming Languages

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Compiling To Logic Gates (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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TLDR; do you know of any general purpose languages that can also compile a function to some representation of AND/OR gates (or NAND gates, or whatever)?

Edit: actually any algebra/formal-logical system is also fine (not just boolean algebra).

Yes, a A LOT of additional info is needed, like defining how input/output is defined, and I am interested in how those would be specified. I'm not interested in printing an actual circuit, just the boolean-logic level. And I'm mostly asking because I feel like most compilers can't generate a clean/mathematical representation from their AST. There's AST to IR, there's hard-coded optimizations on the IR, and then there's hard-coded mappings from the IR to assembly, but at no point (AFAIK) is the code turned into a algebraic/logical system where something like De Morgan's Law can be applied. And that seems really sad to me.

So you could say my real question is: what compilers have a strong logical/algebraic internal representation of their own AST?

Maybe something like Haskell or Prolog do this. The Wolfram Language almost certainly does but it's closed source.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Sorry, I meant a general language rather than one that is described as a "hardware description language". I went ahead and edited the post to be more clear about that.

Thanks for the info though as others might still be interested in it!

[–] Tubbles 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The most low level languages, such as C, compiles down to CPU instructions, which still is way above logic gates. The CPU in turn reads the instructions and controls the computer to in a way "simulate" what could be described as a boolean expression -- at every CPU clock cycle. The next cycle the permutation of all control signals and computer compinents will be different. I highly doubt any programming language implementation has an IR that resembles what you are looking for, including mathematica. The closest you get is probably HDLs but then you need to do all the mathing yourself

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

And with so much stuff being built ontop of C (or at minimum LLVM) I was afraid that would be the case.

I was kinda hoping there would be some hacky compiler that could take a C function like:

short doStuff(short a, short b) {
     short c = a * b;
     short d = c + a; 
     return d;
}

/* A more realistic example would be something like AES/DES/DEA  */

Create boolean inputs for the bits in a and b, and an boolean outputs for c
Have mappings/templates for converting multiply and add into boolean logic expressions
Simplify/compress/optimize the expressions
Print out some kind of expression or maybe graph representation of the logic gates and connections

[–] Tubbles 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can highly recommend you have a look at some HDL languages, eg Verilog can look roughly like your example and synthesizes down to logic elements

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Cool I'll give them I shot! I'll admit I haven't heard great things about typical HDL langs, so I haven't looked into them much

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