Re: your comment from a few years ago regarding LLVM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054682

So what's the best way to tackle the learning curve of what you're suggesting? If I know zero about LLVM and I want to make something like the OP, what should I do?

At the time, I was hoping for an answer to this too — my experience with LLVM was zero.

This lab from MIT 2014 turns out to be a minimalist useful example: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/14fa-e6121/hw/hw2.html

It's a bounds checker rather than a compiler, but it seems to show how to use the full LLVM pipeline. When I realized that this might be an excellent starting point toward your original question, I thought I'd mention it in case it was helpful.