[prbs23]

Interesting concept for a project... From what I have seen in the industry, it seems like this is something every organization ends up developing at least one custom tool for. EDA vendors even generally sell their own solution to this problem, but we always end up back at custom tools. It would be interesting to see if community collaboration could find a better general solution.

That said, it seems like Smelt is far too early in development to be practically used at this point. Some basic table stakes that I didn't see:

- Test weighting. Having a way to specify a relative repeat counts per test is essential when using constrained random tests like we do in the ASIC world.

- Some form of tagging to identify a test as belonging to multiple different groups. When combined with a way to intersect and join groups when specifying the tests to run.

- Control over the random seed for an entire test run. I was glad to see some support for test seeds. However when invoking smelt to run multiple tests, it would be nice to be able to reproducibly seed the generation of each individual test seed. Maybe this is outside the scope of this project?

Great things to see:

- Procedural test generation is a key feature.

- Extendable command invocation

- SLURM support is in the roadmap, also an important feature for groups that use SLURM.

[1024bees]

Thanks for checking out smelt!

Reproducible seeding, and more generically having "test list arguments" are definitely something we have in our view, and wouldn't be outside the scope of the project

Tagging is an interesting problem -- do you find that you use any querying schemes emerge when trying to run a specific set of tests, or is running a test group named "A" normally suffice? Test tagging should be on the roadmap, thanks for calling it out.

Re:test weighting, unsure what you're describing exactly -- would you like to have a mechanism to describe how many times a "root test" has been duplicated with some sampling of random input parameters?