My goal is that we can actually run it, but that would still only be useful for the following things:

- Testing the spec itself - Ensuring that a more production-grade interpreter like Miri has the same semantics as the spec it claims to implement

It's not intended that unsafe Rust authors would ever run the MiniRust interpreter; if they want something like that, they should run Miri instead. They might still read the MiniRust interpreter sources to figure out what the heck Miri is doing.

NQP is also a similar project from the Perl world, a subset of the language that's simpler to implement and has clearer edge-cases.