The painfull verilog preprocessor pitfall

Just a little note about how includes and `defines work in verilog which is VERY different from how they behave in most programming languages. This may not really hurt in a small project, but can become a real PITA in a big project with a dozen of third-party blocks.

TL;DR: Macro defines are have a global scope in verilog and propagate from file to file during one tool invocation.

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Weird Trickery: Compiling verilog VPI extension and unit-testing it using cmake/ctest

A few months ago I needed to write a VPI extension for verilog HDL and (just as I would normally do) I needed a proper buildsystem for that stuff. Unfortunately in terms of build/debug/test tools the folks doing ASIC are living… Well, not in the stone age, but in their own small isolated world and keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. OpenSource iverilog simulator didn’t go far away from the proprietary counterparts that tend to ditch commonly used in linux environments best practices.
Okay, now let’s stop bitching about the way things are and decide how to deal with that kind of stuff. In this note I’ll try to describe how to make a CMakeLists.txt for compiling a VPI extension and unit-testing it with ctest.

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