We did a similar approach back in the day, when going through the Tiger language[0], on the Java version.

Our approach was to model the compiler IR into Assembly macros, and follow the classical UNIX compiler build pipeline, thus even though it wasn't the most performant compiler in the world, we could nonetheless enjoy having our toy compiler generate real executables in the end.

[0] - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern