[8] It [was] also 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.
Microsoft Phoenix defines an intermediate representation (IR) for programs, using ASTs, control-flow graphs, and an exception handling model.
Phoenix comes included with readers for Portable Executable binary files, CIL and the output of the Visual C++ front-end.
[9] Readers for other languages can be written using the Phoenix SDK, though separate tools such as lex and yacc need to be used to write the lexer and parser, respectively.
Phoenix provides the c2.dll compiler backend, which it shares with Visual C++, to handle analysis, optimization and code generation for the x86 architecture.