RFC #77: Stream port name conventions.

[zyp]

Rendered.

[whitequark]

Which exact names should we settle on?

• i / o

These are the ones I've been using recently.

• input / output

These are the ones I've been using in the past. I settled on i and o because if you need to add more streams, expanding them to i_foo and o_bar feels logical, while input_foo and output_bar too verbose and somewhat at odds with how we've been approaching core design (see e.g. lib.io).

• w_stream / r_stream

I would say these, as well as r and w, are acceptable when there is reading and writing involved (like from/to a memory), but not in general. I'm undecided on whether I want a stream.FIFO (or whatever we call it when we land it) should use r/w or i/o. I've been using r/w in Glasgow, but then I found myself mentally mapping them to i/o anyway, at which point standardizing might make more sense.

• sink / source

This is the one option I'm decidedly against. The names are very confusing with plenty of in-the-field feedback to that end from newcomers to LiteX. They don't shorten well (si/so perhaps, but then we're back to i/o). And they have no relation to the existing language/stdlib at all, making them an additional burden to learn. If you've used lib.wiring for a while you're probably used to how inputs become outputs when flipped, and know that flipped(self.i) is an output; now you have to learn that flipped(self.sink) is a source.