You may be interested in this (rough) article I came across: http://liw.iki.fi/liw/misc/hh-blurb.pdf It describes an in-house implementation of a programming language (Lisp dialect) for embedded use. An interesting quote (p. 26): "... The C implementation was done in two stages. First, the Python implementation was rewritten in Python, but using constructs that would easily map into C. For example, simple garbage collection was implemented, and data structures were simple arrays, rather than Python's lists or dictionaries. Using Python for the first stage of the rewrite made it easy to experiment with various approaches and to find abstractions that fit C and worked well. The rewritten Python code was then translated by hand to C." Seo Sanghyeon