Tutorials

Welcome to the Dynamatic tutorials!

To encourage contributions to the project, we aim to support newcomers to the worlds of software development and compilers by providing development tutorials that can help them take their first steps inside the codebase. They are mostly aimed at people who have no or little compiler development experience, especially with the MLIR compiler infrastructure with which Dynamatic is deeply intertwined. Some prior knowledge of C++ (more generally, of object-oriented programming) and of the theory behind dataflow circuits is assumed.

Introduction to Dynamatic

This two-part tutorial first introduces the toolchain and teaches you to use the Dynamatic frontend to synthesize, simulate, and visualize dataflow circuits compiled from C code. The second part guides you through the creation of a small compiler optimization pass and gives you some insight into how the toolchain can help you identify issues in your circuits. This tutorial is a good starting point for anyone wanting to get into Dynamatic, without necessarily modifying it.

The MLIR Primer

This tutorial, heavily based on MLIR’s official language reference, is meant as a quick introduction to MLIR and its core constructs. C++ code snippets are peperred through the tutorial in an attempt to ease newcomers to the framework’s C++ API and provide some initial code guidance.

Creating Compiler Passes

This tutorial goes through the creation of a simple compiler transformation pass that operates on Handshake-level IR (i.e., on dataflow circuits modeled in MLIR). It goes into details into all the code that one needs to write to declare a pass in the codebase, implement it, and then run it on some input code using the dynamatic-opt tool. It then touches on different ways to write the same pass as to give an idea of MLIR’s code transformation capabilities.