Microsoft Phoenix was an SDK available from Microsoft Connect for creating compilers, optimize code, and perform code analysis. Microsoft described it in the past tense on 2008-07-01.

Original Description

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to be used as the back-end for future compiler technologies from

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

. It asalso available as an SDK, a pre-release build of which has been made accessible, to create compilers and code analysis tools using the Phoenix framework.

Overview

Microsoft Phoenix defines an ''intermediate representation'' (IR) for programs, using ASTs,

control-flow graph In computer science, a control-flow graph (CFG) is a representation, using graph notation, of all paths that might be traversed through a program during its execution. The control-flow graph was discovered by Frances E. Allen, who noted tha ...

s, and an exception handling model. For any program to be handled by Phoenix, it needs to be converted to this representation. The specification for these file type-specific converters, called ''file readers'' in Phoenix terminology, is also specified. Phoenix comes included with readers for

Portable Executable The Portable Executable (PE) format is a file format for executables, object code, DLLs and others used in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows operating systems. The PE format is a data structure that encapsulates the information necessary f ...

binary files, CIL and the output of the

Visual C++ Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++ and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available in both tr ...

front-end. Readers for other languages can be written using the Phoenix SDK, though separate tools such as lex and

yacc Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a Look Ahead Left-to-Right Rightmost Derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a comp ...

need to be used to write the

lexer In computer science, lexical analysis, lexing or tokenization is the process of converting a sequence of characters (such as in a computer program or web page) into a sequence of ''lexical tokens'' (strings with an assigned and thus identified m ...

and

parser Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...

, respectively. Once the program has been converted to the IR, the analysis and optimization tools can operate on that form. Phoenix includes a selection of tools – including block counting, memory analysis,

code coverage In computer science, test coverage is a percentage measure of the degree to which the source code of a program is executed when a particular test suite is run. A program with high test coverage has more of its source code executed during testing ...

code analysis In computer science, static program analysis (or static analysis) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution. The term i ...

and

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

. The Phoenix SDK can be used to write and plug-in other tools as well. Code generation is handled by providing architecture-specific (either physical architecture of the processor or a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

architecture) ''file writers''. Phoenix provides the c2.dll compiler backend, which it shares with Visual C++, to handle analysis, optimization and code generation for the x86 architecture. Writers for other architectures must be provided separately. As a result of the modular architecture, any component can be replaced without affecting the rest of the system. For example, to target the compiler to a different architecture, only the file writer specific to the architecture needs to be changed, keeping the rest of the stack unchanged. To create a compiler for a new language, only the readers need to be provided.

Productization

A Phoenix component (phx.dll) is used for some of the static analysis (

FxCop FxCop is a free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft's .NET Framework Design Guidelines. Overview Unlike StyleCop, or the Lint programming tool, for the C programming l ...

) in Visual Studio 2010. (The Phoenix compiler itself, which is required for most instrumentation insertion to work, is not included with Visual Studio.)

References

External links

Official Phoenix sitePhoenix SDK June 2008 CTP Release
latest release to the moment of writing) {{Microsoft Research Compilers Microsoft Research

Original Description

Overview

Productization

See also

References

External links