Documentation

@Nic30 doc gen (data as DOM + comments in objects)

Existing solutions:

• Doxygen
• VHDLDocL

@flip111 For documentation i would say the browser is the preferred platform. Here you can have written documentation, display code snippets (no editing), display smaller or bigger schematics and sometimes it helps to show a waveform as well.

Agree. However, I think it is useful to support PDF generation with LaTeX. E.g. Pandoc or Sphinx can generate both PDFs and websites from the same sources. Hugo and Jekyll generate static web pages.

@flip111 If the IDE solution still uses javascript for the most parts then there is real synergy between an IDE and a documentation viewer.

I'd say that the IDE should be able to show static HTML. No need to add the requirement to run JavaScript. Although it is desirable and features can be added if JavaScript is available.

@flip111 @Paebbels makes a good point here that it's important to be able to host on already existing infrastructure. Since maintaining infrastructure yourself is a day job on itself.

There is no infrastructure required. Yo can have a static website locally and explore it either with the browser or with an IDE that can render HTML. Quite a lot of apps have the help written in HTML.

@flip111 What is actually the benefit of GHDL for documentation? For the parsing there are other solutions in competition. So it's main advantage is actually what it was build for generating waveform (simulation). But i think it would be ok if the documentation writer can do the simulation offline and just upload the vcd file along with the documentation.

The main advantage for me is that GHDL is required. None of the other features make sense to me if I cannot simulate the code I'm writing. Therefore, using GHDL for documentation is about not adding dependencies to my framework, unless strictly required to get a feature. See references to existing GHDL options as --pp-html above.