Smalltalk debug lives in the Matrix
Abstract
Agile programming aware computer scientists know how much productivity they owe to their development envi- ronments, and more precisely to advanced debuggers. Indeed, debuggers are mandatory to support an optimistic do-fix-rerun approach. This development scheme does not make sense in hardware design where agile has a different meaning; it refers to re- configurable architectures. Despite such architectures support tailoring and refactoring application circuits and promote short development cycles, the overall programing scheme still conforms to waterfall models and components based integration. This paper presents a path to offer probe-based development to hardware designers, and introduces our Red Pill environment this mixes up several abstraction levels ranging from C like parallel coding to hardware realization embedding debug facility. Red Pill is developed using visualworks and reproduces some of VisualWorks browser well known features that traditionally miss when validating circuits.