Roslyn Scripting Overview

A compiler is a black box. It takes source code as an input, magic happens in the middle, and object files or assemblies come out as an output.

• As compilers perform some processing and build up a deep understanding of the code, but that knowledge is only available to the compiler implementation wizards.
• The information is promptly forgotten after the translated output is produced.

Roslyn exposes the C# and Visual Basic compiler's code analysis to you as a consumer by providing an API layer that mirrors a traditional compiler pipeline.

Each phase of the above pipeline is now a separate component.

• In the parser phase, the source is tokenized and parsed into syntax that follows the language grammar.
• In the declaration phase, the declarations from source and imported metadata are analyzed to form named symbols.
• The binding phase, the identifiers in the code are matched to symbols.
• Finally, in the emit phase, all the information built up by the compiler is emitted as an assembly.