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+This directory contains the sources of GHDL, the VHDL simulator.
+
+GHDL is not an interpreter: it generates machine code from your design,
+the only way for high speed simulation.
+
+Main features are:
+- handle very large designs like leon3/grlib.
+- can write waveforms to a vcd or fst file.
+- available on Linux (x86 and x86-64), Windows and Mac OS x
+- partial support of PSL
+- support vunit (https://github.com/LarsAsplund/vunit)
+- support OSVVM (http://osvvm.org) through the VPI interface
+- support cocotb
+
+GHDL fully supports IEEE 1076-1987, IEEE 1076-1993, IEE 1076-2002 and
+partially the 1076-2008 version of VHDL.
+
+GHDL is free software.  See the file COPYING for copying permission.
+The manuals, and some of the runtime libraries, are under different
+terms; see the individual source files for details.
+
+Doc is available on http://ghdl.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
+
+Building GHDL (Short instructions)
+**********************************
+
+If you aren't on linux, see below for full instructions.
+
+You need GNAT GPL 2014 (or later) for x86 (32 or 64 bits).  GNAT is the GNU Ada
+compiler and GNAT GPL is very easy to install (download anonymously from
+libre.adacore.com, untar and run the doinstall script).  You also need
+zlib (for Debian or Ubuntu: install zlib1g-dev package).
+
+In the GHDL source directory, configure and build:
+$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
+$ make
+
+At that place, you can already use the 'ghdl_mcode' built in the directory.
+You can also install GHDL (the executable is installed as 'ghdl'):
+$ make install
+
+That's all!
+
+Build GHDL (Long instructions)
+******************************
+
+See BUILD.txt