really work towards them. But this also holds on a smaller
scale. When, during coding you encounter a problem, it's often easy to
solve just that problem. However, after stacking a few small solutions on top of each
-other, things get complicated real fast. Then, it helps to take a step back and
+other, things get complicated real fast. It helps to take a step back and
try to find the bigger problem you are trying to solve, and evaluate
subsolutions in that perspective.
During my (limited amount of) work with the new hardware design, it became
quickly apparent that trying to design the hardware in an optimal way, was
completely impossible (when trying to stay within area and power constraints).
-The most important issue in this design is finding the balance between two sides
-of a tradeoff, which was quite often hardware vs compiler complexity. Especially
+The most important issue here is finding the balance between two sides
+of a tradeoff, which was quite often hardware versus compiler complexity. Especially
this last issue makes it very clear that when designing hardware, the supporting
tooling should be designed in parallel, to prevent the tooling from needing to
be overly complex.
make the compiler considerably less complex and more reliable, at the cost of
larger hardware complexity, area and power consumption.
-All in all, I feel that this internship has worked out quite well. The people
-were cooperating, the job was fun yet challenging and the result is
-well-received.
+However, when looking at the end result, I can conclude that the frontend has
+indeed improved a lot. Even though there are not as many features added to
+MontiumC as hoped, the existing features are more reliably supported now. The
+improvements in the frontend have allowed the backend to become simpler as
+well. Further improvement in this area is still possible, but there are a lot
+of things that the frontend simply cannot deal with, since it requires more
+hardware-specific knowledge or timing information, which the frontend does not
+have.
+
+Using the LLVM for developing the frontend has turned out to work quite well.
+It provides a lot of support code to simplify transforming of code. Also, the
+library-oriented architecture makes it easy to reuse (small) parts of the
+system, while leaving out other parts. In some cases the LLVM code is less
+suitable, but this is mostly solvable and should be less of an issue once the
+new hardware is finished.
+
+All in all, I feel that this internship has worked out quite well.
+Cooperation with other employees was pleasant, the job was fun yet
+challenging and the result is well-received.
projects / matthijs / projects / internship.git / blobdiff