The Magouilles project is aimed at developing computational artifacts
that run on FPGAs. In particular, in the long term, it aims to develop
a basic Scheme Machine.
The name of the project comes from the French expression:
Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ces magouilles!, which translates loosely into
Gosh, what schemes!.
It is hoped that the schemes instantiated by the project will find utility
amongst computational philosophers, practitioners, and critics.
The initial plan is for the succession of artifacts to be named andouille, bidouille, cafouille, depatouille, embrouille, fripouille, and so on. Andouille is currently available. It is a warm-up exercise consisting of RISC-V SOCs implemented on Lattice iCE40 FPGAs. Bidouille is expected to be a modified RISC-V SOC with 32-bit/64-bit interoperability (it may be skipped). Cafouille is expected to be a version of the Armpit Scheme interpreter, that would run on the RV32IM andouille artifact. Depatouille, and followers, may improve on the interpreter, or progressively integrate Scheme functionality into the FPGA, or both. A hardware implementation of floating-point operations is also considered (not harmful). This current-continuation plan does not form a closure at present, rather, it is fluidly bound as this is early days in the project. It is to be re-evaluated eagerly or lazily, and applied accordingly.