What are the tools for semantic analysis phase of

Question

Compiler construction can be divided into several phases such as Lexical analysis, Syntax analysis, Semantic analysis and etc. In lexical analysis, there are tools such as Lex, Flex and etc. In syntax analysis, there are tools such as Yacc, Bison, etc. I'm just curious what are the tools available for semantic analysis phase?

Answer 1

To the best of my knowledge there are no language-agnostic tools to perform type checking and if there were, they'd certainly not be generally applicable as many language's type system's are too different and complex to be handled by generalized tools.

With scope resolution there's some room for tools to handle it for you. For example if your language has simple enough scoping rules, the XText framework can entirely take care of scope resolution for you if you add some annotations to your grammar. In more complex cases, you'll have to write some additional code yourself.

Then, if you compile to LLVM, you can use the LLVM framework to perform all kinds of control-flow analyses for you.