Reply To: Specification

You are describing what the sim does 🙂

Of course, the sim is dynamic, while an asm has to be static. And unlike the specializer and sim, asm doesn’t have width information, and so it also does not have latency info, which is needed to track the belt. And then there’s the question of what to do at control-flow joins, especially joins that include the back edges of loops. The problem is roughly equivalent to type inference, i.e. mostly solvable in most code but not in general, and far more work than you’d want to do in an assembler. Good for a PhD if you wanted one though 🙂