Over the weekend, I've once again found myself going down a rabbit hole of dynamic language compiler design. I was reminded of two approaches that grabbed my interest from a pedagogical perspective, because it simplifies and makes approachable the typically revered task of compiler development for a high level language.
First, A nanopass framework for commercial compiler development by Keep and Dyvbig presents a way to incrementally develop a compiler by dividing the task of compilation into very many small "nanopasses", each of which lowers one high level abstraction into a lower one.
Second, An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction by Ghuloum slices up the task of compiler development in the other direction, by starting with a minimal compiler that lowers numeric constants to assembly, then in a couple dozen incremental steps adds small abstractions like functions and stacks, closures, and GC on top.
Both of these works have implementations in Scheme, the first in nanopass-framework-scheme and the second in namin/inc. I'm hoping to write a compiler for Klisp, which is a Scheme in many ways, by following the latter paper soon. Should be fun.