Choosing an intermediate language

Question

I am currently playing around with programming languages. I have spent some time writing parsers and interpreters in high level languages (most notably Haxe).

I have had some results, that I think are actually quite nice, but now I'd like to make them fast.

My idea was to translate the input language into C.
My C knowledge is limitted to what you learn at university. Beyond some exercises, I have never written actual C programs. But I feel confident I can make it work.

Of course I could try to write a frontend for the LLVM or to generate MSIL or JVM bytecode. But I feel that's too much to learn right now, and I don't see much of a gain actually.
Also C is perfectly human readable, so if I screw up, it's much easier to understand why. And C is, after all, high level. I can really translate concepts from the input language without too much mind-bending. I should be having something working up and running in a reasonable amount of time and then optimize it as I see fit.

So: Are there any downsides to using C? Can you recommend an alternative?
Thank you for your insight :)

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Edit: Some Clarification

• The reason why I want to go all the way down is, that I am writing a language with OOP support and I want to actually implement my method dispatching by hand, because I have something very specific in mind.
• A primary area of use would be writing HTTP services, but I could image adding bindings to a GUI library (wxWidgets maybe) or whatever.

Answer 1

C is a good and quite popular choice for what you're trying to do.

Still, take a look at LLVM's intermediate language (IR). It's pretty readable and I think it's cleaner and easier to generate and parse than C. LLVM comes with quite a big collection of tools to work with it. You can generate native code for variety of platforms (as with C but with slightly more control over output) or for virtual machines. Possibility of JIT compilation is also a plus.

See The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Chapter 11 for introduction to LLVM approach and some snippets of IR.

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