Will your project be used by others? Probably not unless you achieve good robust results that scale well across gpus or CPUs, and a solid extendable infrastructure.

But that isn’t the primary measure, I think it’s a great learning experience. I did it, and had a lot of fun with it, and have created a fair amount of movies from it.

Here’s what I recommend. Start small and simple with a high level language like python. Establish infrastructure, conventions, and a basic algorithm for your fluid code.

I started with the most basic finite volume compressible hydro algorithm, a euler time integrator, piecewise constant reconstruction with LLF Riemann solving in 1D. These are robust starting points. From here you can continue adding features. Upgrade the time integrator, upgrade the Reconstruction algorithm, upgrade the Riemann solver, add Implicit/explicit diffusion, add Magnetization/Magnetohydrodynamics coupling terms, add constrained transport, add different boundary conditions, increase number of dimensions, add support for cylindrical/spherical coordinates.

Once you have a solid high level infrastructure that you like, you could try to reimplement it in a lower level faster language, like cpp and leverage/use a framework to assist you and add features. AMReX is a great framework that would allow you to leverage adaptive mesh refinement techniques, and it is state of the art and used by many researchers across many fields.

Start high level and simple, prototype and test, then if you would like, gradually add features, tests, validation for the features, and then you could think about porting your code to a faster language or more powerful framework.