The Phoenix Framework

The Phoenix framework is an enhanced infrastructure for compilers and programming tools. Phoenix supports a range of languages and is easily retargeted for a variety of architectures.

Phoenix is an open, extensible environment designed to meet the needs of two audiences: developers who need production-level compilers and tools, and researchers who develop programming tools and languages. For the production developer, Phoenix offers a large set of building blocks that enable you to combine methods and objects to build a tool to achieve a specific result. The same code generator supports type-safe languages such as  C# and other languages such as C++ and Visual Basic. Optimizations and analyses can be run at many levels of the code generation process, not just at the end, and results of different runs can provide information to one another.

Researchers gain a solid infrastructure designed for modular code reuse that smoothly retargets different architectures and languages. New tools and compiler elements can be developed without the usual requirement to develop a new infrastructure at the same time. New tools, better-performing phases, and more versatile readers all run on the same platform. In addition, because research happens on the same code base as production, transferring new packages from research to production happens seamlessly.

The following image shows a conceptual overview of the Phoenix platform.

Go to Phoenix architecture.