Introduction to TableGen syntax

This section serves as a quick tour of all the important and common TableGen syntax, providing all the essential knowledge to get hands-on, writing a donut recipe in TableGen in the next section.

TableGen is a domain-specific programming language used for modeling custom data layouts. Despite being a programming language, it does something quite different from conventional languages. Conventional programming languages usually describe actions performed on the (input) data, how they interact with the environment, and how they generate results, regardless of the programming paradigms (imperative, functional, event-driven…) you adopt. TableGen, in contrast, barely describes any actions.

TableGen is designed only to describe structural static data. First, developers define the layout—which is essentially just a table with many fields—of their desired data structure. They then need to fill data into those layouts right away as most...