Comment by gorgoiler

I built an emulator in Python with my students, aged 15 and 16. All it did was have a little chunk of memory, PC, some registers, arithmetic, and branching, but it was really fun and a surprisingly tractable project to work on. Once you have a working “machine” with an assembler you can then start to automate function call and return which is of course a large part of what a compiler does for you.

With hindsight I would have loved to do a proper compiler but that’s undergrad level really. I really recommend it as a toy post-food-coma project for when you’re stuck with the family either next week or at the end of December :)