There's also a reasonable chance that if you're interested in compiler design and making an architecture you're the sort of person who would enjoy learning a ha

There's also a reasonable chance that if you're interested in compiler design and making an architecture you're the sort of person who would enjoy learning a hardware description language. With a cheap FPGA dev board you could then implement your toy architecture and run your compiled programs on that. This adds substantial difficulty to the project, but is damn fun.