I'm looking around for a modern tool chain to help in developing a small programming language/DSL. I would like to explore Phoenix from MS Research, but it looks like a dead project. Is that the case, and should I be looking elsewhere?
I'd like to target CIL with Phoenix, but would definitely consider LLVM (or other) if that was the best tool chain to use.
On
Irony is a development kit for implementing languages on the .NET platform. The Mono stack also has some tools to help writing out IL assemblies - I'm thinking of Cecil in particular.
Another approach would be to output C# from your DSL. That would give you a higher-level 'target' language for your DSL.
To the best of my knowledge, Phoenix is dead. I am not a Microsoft employee though.
LLVM is being very actively developed, but it may be an overkill for a small DSL, especially if you want to target a managed runtime that has its own JIT compiler.