Personally, I'd want to have a --disable-v8 option. If I'm writing a web application in C, I must have had tight speed/memory/code size requirements; a JSON-based v8-backed template language doesn't seem to fit very well. (Yes, v8 is pretty fast, but if it's fast/small enough for what I'm doing, I wouldn't be using C.)
Have you considered LuaJIT instead of v8? Given you are using v8 as a target VM for compiling another language to javascript, and lua is quite similar, although if other javascript libraries are used that could be a major factor. (This is assuming you are writing Chrysalis/Stencil)
Normal Lua's performance is also quite decent (especially compared to its peers: Python, Ruby, and Perl), and has a very clear path for moving hotspots out to C. LuaJIT's performance is just a bonus. :)
That's a good idea. (I am writing Chrysalis/Stencil). The current design is that there is a code-generator that outputs javascript which can be run on either side. But outputting Lua instead for the server-side would seem possible.
Also, compiling to Lua is not a bad option. Its syntax (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8) is quite straightforward, and it's designed to compile rapidly (due to using table as a JSON-like serialization format).
While writing out a (kinda silly) benchmark a while ago, it struck me that, while Python's compiler is rather slow, Lua's has very little impact on the overall runtime. Between that and the lack of weird corner cases in the grammar, I'm reasonably comfortable doing string-eval metaprogramming in Lua, something I would never do in Python.
