Architecture Specification Language (ASL) is an executable language for writing clear, precise specifications of Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs).

The ASL interpreter (ASLi) is an implementation of ASL that can execute ASL specifications either in an interpreter or by compiling via C code. You can download ASLi from https://github.com/IntelLabs/asl-interpreter and install by following the README. We include a small demonstration of how to use ASLi to build simulators for a toy architecture specification.

This tool is based on Arm’s open source asl-interpreter release with extensive modifications to

  • Change ASLi to support most of ASL version 1.0 requiring significant changes to the AST, lexer, parser and typechecker.
  • Cleanup the “CPU” API that ASLi expects an ISA to implement.
  • Add support for compiling ASL specifications to C by adding many transformations and multiple runtimes.
  • Add a demo ISA to illustrate how to generate simulators from an ASL specification.
  • Split libASL out from ASLi to make it easier to reuse parts of ASLi in other tools.
  • Add support for loading ELF files and executing binaries.

We welcome contributions following the Contributing instructions.

Please file issues on the GitHub project page at https://github.com/IntelLabs/asl-interpreter/issues and security issues following the instructions in the Security Policy file.