I like starting with designing a VM. It lets you short-circuit many of the nasty parts of code emission and results in a portable language off the bat. One of m

I like starting with designing a VM. It lets you short-circuit many of the nasty parts of code emission and results in a portable language off the bat. One of my big backburner projects is a simplified virtual game console designed to be a Forth machine. I've built a compiler for a very simple dialect of Forth, and I've started using it as a testbed for more sophisticated compilers- so far I have toy compilers for FORTRAN and a TinyBASIC with plans for an ALGOL-60 implementation and a classical Lisp. Perhaps this will interest someone: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako