Everything you say is true, but a very simple compiler with little/no optimisations should be quite easy to write. Indeed it is often coursework in undergraduat

Everything you say is true, but a very simple compiler with little/no optimisations should be quite easy to write. Indeed it is often coursework in undergraduate compilers courses (for source languages simpler than Rust). The main difficult would be the type-checker, but you could reuse the existing one, for it does not affect run-time performance.