Building the VM translator for Project 8 felt like a natural evolution from Project 7, much like how Project 7 built conceptually on Project 6's foundation. The modular design I started in the assembler, with clean separation between Parser and CodeWriter classes, paid off. I extended the existing VM translator by just adding new command types to the parser and corresponding translation methods to the CodeWriter. The OOP structure made this expansion surprisingly straightforward and easy.

What struck me most was how this project revealed the hidden complexity of function calls- something I'd always taken for granted as a programmer. Seeing how the stack based calling convention actually works under the hood, with its intricate back and forth of saving state, repositioning pointers, and managing return addresses, gave me a new appreciation for what compilers do behind the scenes. The recursive Fibonacci function was cool to see, as it showed parallels between the LIFO nature of the stack and the LIFO behavior of nested function calls- further explaining what I knew about recursion.

The most challenging piece was getting the function calling protocol exactly right. The sequence of operations for `call` and `return` commands required careful attention to detail, especially managing the temporary registers and ensuring the stack frame was constructed correctly.