GHDL is a GCC front-end for the VHDL (IEEE 1076) language. Currently, GHDL implements most of VHDL-1987 and some features of VHDL-1993. It is mature enough to compile and run some complex designs (such as a DLX processor and leon1, a SPARCv7 processor).

GHDL has been developped on a GNU/Linux x86 system, and only this configuration has been tested (porting to other processor or system should not be an hard task, but there are system dependent files in the run time).

GHDL is written in Ada95 (using GNAT) and relies on agcc, an Ada binding for GCC. It also includes a run-time library (written in Ada), named grt. The front-end and the library are both distributed under the GPL licence.

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Update

• foreign attribute handled. You can now call subprograms defined in a foreign language (such as C or Ada).
• ghdl entry point added: you can start the VHDL simulation from your own program.
• bug fixed: triple use.
• bug fixed: incomplete types