Sorting By Functions in Verilog
Sometimes we’ll want to sort a collection by something other than its natural order. For example, suppose we wanted to sort strings by their length instead of alphabetically. Here’s an example of custom sorts in Verilog.
In this Verilog implementation, we’ve had to make several adjustments due to the language differences:
Verilog doesn’t have built-in string types, so we’ve defined a custom
string_t
struct to represent strings.There’s no direct equivalent to Go’s slices in Verilog, so we’re using fixed-size arrays.
Verilog doesn’t have built-in sorting functions, so we’ve implemented a simple bubble sort algorithm for both string length sorting and age sorting.
The
compare_lengths
andcompare_ages
functions return -1, 0, or 1 to indicate less than, equal to, or greater than, similar to Go’scmp.Compare
.We’ve used Verilog’s
initial
block to set up and run our sorting operations, which is somewhat analogous to Go’smain
function in this context.The
$display
function is used to output results, similar to Go’sfmt.Println
.
Note that this Verilog code is more of a simulation and wouldn’t be synthesizable as-is. In real hardware design, sorting would typically be implemented differently, often using dedicated sorting networks or other hardware-friendly algorithms.