That's a fair point. It's never easy and I had that rough experience, too. I mean, I wasn't a real expert on these things so mine was a reimplementation of existing work but still hard.

Curious, what was your language's interesting properties?

"I guess I am reluctant to realize how much easier it would have been with a lisp."

It might help if you see a modern example. The recent language impressing me the most with its features is Julia:

http://julialang.org/

Wondering aloud about how they pulled all that off, esp macro's, led someone here to tell me it's actually femtolisp internally:

https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

So, they appear to have built a simple LISP, then used it to incrementally build a compiler for a complex language. They just represent the syntax internally in a LISP form and work with it from there. Don't know much more than that but it shows the power of the concept.

Better demo is the one below as it goes step-by-step in stages. One commenter (Orion63) pointed out the author was re-using the proven cheat: "build a LISP, do it all in LISP, profit." Haha. I've considered duplicating that work with different language options.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065

I always think of this HN post every few years, as an aside, someone really needs to archive that page it links to because I wont be surprised when that site shuts down or deletes old content:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065

https://speakerdeck.com/nineties/creating-a-language-using-o...