Comment by tsimionescu

In my university, compilers were a third-year course. And they're anything but simple - even the most well solved part of them, parsing, used to be a research-level problem until fairly recently. To build even a simple non-optimizing compiler you have to understand a whole lot of other fundamentals, such as various data structures, that are much, much harder to understand in assembler then in any higher level language, even C.