Type conversions

Apart from enabling cross-language function calls, a fundamental problem that a binding tool like PyStim must address is to provide access to native Python types in SystemVerilog and vice versa. In the PyStim library, used a Python types wrappers on the SystemVerilog side and a native Python type on the Python side. PyStim refers to this as a type conversion.

The main downside is that a copy of the data must be made on every Python ↔ SystemVerilog transition: this is needed since the SystemVerilog and Python versions of the same type generally won’t have the same memory layout.

PyStim provides almost all Python types wrappers to SystemVerilog . An overview is provided in the table “List of all builtin native type mappings”.

The following subsection discuss Python ↔ SystemVerilog types handling in more detail. The main focus in this section is on type conversions, which represent the last case of the above list.

• Overview