Comment by pm215

I haven't looked at them, partly because I'm sceptical about how much use they are. In my experience the hard part of emulating new instructions is the semantics, the "what does this instruction actually do?" bit. The line in the decode file that specifies the 1s and 0s and fields is trivial and takes no time. Plus, the way the architecture splits things up often doesn't match the way that makes the emulation simpler: for instance "same operation, but comes in signed and unsigned flavours" is often encoded with a sign bit but appears in the architecture as two separate instructions, one with an S in the name and one with a U. It's often simpler to have one decode line which covers both and passes signedness as an argument, where something auto-generated from the architectual data would give you two distinct functions.

For cases where everything you need is really in the datafiles (e.g. a simple disassembler) or where you're providing a user facing API that you want to have match the architecture documentation closely, the tradeoffs are different.

Also for QEMU I tend to value "works the same regardless of target architecture" over "we can do a clever thing for this one case but all the others will be different".