On: Show HN: Minimax – A Compressed-First, Microcoded ...

[nine_k]

I suspect some heavier lifting is done here:

    use ieee.std_logic_1164.all;
    use ieee.numeric_std.all;

It looks that the VHDL source is about instruction decoding, registers, etc, but does not include things like ALU logic. (I don't know VHDL actually.)

[robinsonb5 → nine_k]

Those two lines are just the VHDL equivalent of #include <stdio.h> - i.e. boilerplate that you'll see in almost every source file.

But it's true that you don't have to describe the ALU down to the bit level - thanks to those two lines you can say "q <= d1 + d2" instead of having to build an adder at the gate level. (Though you can, of course, do that if you really want to!)