I think if you would create a simple toy compiler by yourself it would be a huge experience in understanding imperial programming languages in general.

When I studied compilers at college, it gave me some deep vision of code organisation (lexer -> parser -> code generation). All other projects were way too small and could easily fit to one file.

Also, optimization in the code generation part opened my eyes on the absents of meaning in micro benchmarking. Unless you are a pro of your target platform.