It's not that hard. I'm thinking the song "let it go" can help (define determinism as an eventual goal; at least, that is the approach I find that works for me).
It's not that it's theoretically hard, but writing a compiler with typechecking and all is just a lot of work. It's a master thesis, btw, not a doctoral one.
My own project, Glitch uses replay to work out glitches (bubbles of non determinism in a deterministic execution), it incidentally also makes writing incremental compilers easy (see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...), and I recently used it for a new type checker (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__28QzBdyBU&feature=youtu.be). Ok, it's still a lot of work, but if you look at the problem you are solving, solving it can make the compiler writing aspect easier also.
