Contributor Guide

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to help new contributors to get started on the project. We do this by providing a high level overview of the project goals, norms and architectural decisions.

Goals

The project also aims to develop a fully featured language server based on a reusable VHDL parsing & analysis library. The VHDL parsing & analysis library is intended to be able to be re-used by other open source projects such that also need such functionally. The idea is that the investment in parsing & analyzing VHDL can be shared by many projects.

The choice of making a language server be the driving requirement behind the parsing & analysis library is the assumption that a language server is the most difficult requirement for such a library. A language server requires quick incremental re-analysis as well as robust handling of syntactically incorrect code as it is being edited. A fast and full featured language server also provides a lot of value to the users of VHDL.