If you haven't taken a look at Nimrod, it might give you some ideas, or perhaps inspire you to be a code contributor! As a python guy, I'm really liking it for some hobby work I'm doing. The compiler and standard library are MIT licensed.

http://nimrod-lang.org/ https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod

Also, there's a recent forum posting about the decision not to do LLVM codgen for now: http://forum.nimrod-lang.org/t/480. Perhaps you can ask some questions of the main contributors; they're quite responsive.