Get the latest tech news

The Sail instruction-set semantics specification language

Introduction Sail is a language for expressing the instruction-set architecture (ISA) semantics of processors. Vendor architecture specification documents typically describe the sequential behaviour of their ISA with a combination of prose, tables, and pseudocode for each instruction.

The method like accessor syntax was (overly sweet) syntactic sugar for getter and setter functions following a specific naming convention that was generated by the bitfield. Mappings are a feature of Sail that allow concise expression of bidirectional relationships between values that are common in ISA specifications: for example, bit-representations of an enum type, or the encoding-decoding of instructions. However, all the constraint and sizeof definitions must be re-written to produce executable code, which can result in the generated theorem prover output diverging (in appearance) somewhat from the source input.

Get the Android app