Comment by dunham

You're in good company. The original C++ compiler translated to C. Haskell translates to C--.

That sounds like a good approach, concentrate on the things you want to do/learn and let the C compiler pick up the rest. You can then be finished, add to your front end, or start replacing the backend.

My language compiles to Javascript. I wanted to concentrate on the frontend tasks like type checking and elaboration, and I wanted a web playground (the language is now self-hosted). Javascript got me a runtime with closures and garbage collection for free.