Content assist in integrated development environments for hardware description languages

Sammanfattning: Content assist is one of the most powerful features in integrated development environments (IDE). While a lot of research papers exist on content assist for software programming languages (SPL), hardware description languages (HDL) aren’t covered at all. In this thesis, we improve content assist for SystemVerilog, one of the most widely used HDL, by using different ordering strategies and comparing them to each other. In the end, 6 different strategies are kept: two based on frequencies, one on the usage of the content assist, one on the name of the variable, one on the type of the variable, and one on the distance from their declaration to the cursor position. We test our implementation in 3 different open-source projects well-known and used by the SystemVerilog community: OpenTitan, SweRV, and riscv-dv. We achieve having the expected entry in the top 5 in more than 40% of cases with no prefix and up to 66% of cases with 1 character already typed.