It's in the context of a compiler course. When I was TA I've never had students that found it easy. Semantic analysis and optimizations are as easy or hard as t

It's in the context of a compiler course. When I was TA I've never had students that found it easy. Semantic analysis and optimizations are as easy or hard as the course material dictates. I believe the focus was on the first part because for the most part, writing a small DSL and converting that into an AST is relevant for most CS professionals, where as I think semantic analysis and optimization are only day-to-day relevant for the small subset of people that work on compilers.