What do you want to do? You could write a LISP interpreter in a high level language in an hour, you could target the JVM/CLR/whatever and get fairly high performance and GC without too much work, you could spend months/years writing a quality language runtime + native compiler, etc.

http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ is coming along really nicely.

Reading academic papers can give you some excellent ideas once you get into the weeds (e.g. garbage collection, compiler optimization).