> This reminds me of when people try to make a new Ruby implementation. They get the basics down and think "this isn't so bad! I can do this!". Fast forward a few months and they're stuck on some nasty little edge case around eval and method_missing that they need to run Rails. Or some weird aspect of C extensions.

This is true of many programming languages projects. It's not uncommon for someone to write a language in a weekend, and then marvel at how their very simple toy language is faster than C! And look how quickly it compiles! Thus begins a several years-long journey, where with every feature added the runtime and compiler get slower and slower and slower.