[dandotway]

> I like the idea of a small, performant language

So the earliest C compilers were under 5000 lines of C+asm:

  https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc

If you want a minimal "standard committee approved" C89 compiler then David Hanson's lcc and Fabrice Bellard's tcc both come out to over 30,000 lines. To understand C89 fully you at a minimum have to read a ~220 page (14,248 line) copy of the (draft) ANSI standard:

  http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.txt

I don't know what the smallest C23 compiler would be with all the new features since C89 added, but it's at the point where a single human can't implement a C compiler anymore. It's becoming a language only rich corporations have the wealth and power to implement and steer.