The esoteric language BF was designed to be a language where you could write a very small compiler. Self-hosting BF is significantly harder though.
If we designed languages to minimise total LOC for a project plus its compiler, what would end up with?
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Blogging about my programming language project: choosing the basic syntax!
https://www.garden-lang.org/blog/syntax.html
I would have thought that invoking a C compiler would be a solved problem. Looking at Rust's cc crate there's a remarkable long tail of corner cases to fix.
Exotic CPUs, microarchitectures, compiler differences, operating system differences, etc.
https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
Some delightful examples of good compiler error messages in the latest Gleam release: https://gleam.run/news/context-aware-compilation/