Muhammad Ali Akhtar

Speaking for my self so these thoughts may not apply for everyone else.

whenever I am learning new language, I like to practice as much as possible, and by practice, I mean, create my own code files from scratch and start with small coding examples. However, in learning journey, when I tried to create my own file and write some practice code, I had no idea how to compile that code (the new file). took me two days (and help from apaj) to figure out that I also have to write the test harness and add some description to "Launcher.scala" in test/scala sub folders. And when I created my own file, I just wanted to compile for syntax errors.

Coding requires practice. First I want to become comfortable with the language syntax. This part is where I have a compiler in my head and code on piece of paper (no computer / IDEs involved). For this, learning journey is a good start, however, to become comfortable with syntax, a working IDE is really helpful, so I would stress more on Intelij / Eclipse.

There are some miscellaneous questions:

Is there some starting point of code in chisel? like main in C++ / top module in verilog. the package is the name of the folder where all your scala files reside? All your code files must reside in src/main/scala? what is the meaning of test:runMain. Starting from an empty directory, how should I just write a simple OR gate in chisel and compile it? What is build.sbt file. Do you have to manually create it or is it automatically created for you?