To some extent, sure - but Rust leans heavily on static analysis even for "simple" code. Something as fundamental as File::open is still generic over "types that can be coerced into a &Path" - which is obviously useful, but it probably means you would need to implement a lot of the type system (+ stubbed out borrow/reference semantics?) just to get rustc's parser bootstrapped.

This is actually tenable for C, though - so maybe you could cook up some sort of C -> C++ -> LLVM -> rustc bootstrap.