Using design patterns for type unification and introspection in SystemC

Abstract

Reflective environments such as .NET have provided programmers with the ability to gain access to a program structural information with ease. Reflectivity allows program metadata to be accessible at runtime. C++ is perceived by many to be a well-balanced language; it combines elegant software constructs and raw execution speed. Due to C++ success, many hardware engineers are moving away for traditional solution such as VHDL to new ones such as System. Since SystemC is based on C++, it is lacking some of the advanced features and concepts available in modern languages. For this raison, our team has built a system-level modeling environment called Esys.Net that is based on .Net and C#. We are now looking at interoperability avenues between ESys.Net and SystemC. We propose a solution that, through data introspection, could greatly ease interoperability between SystemC and other environments (and tools) such as ESys.Net, while avoiding the RTTI (Run Time Type Information) library.