This is a nice suggestion. The javascript engine has an i/o interface, and it could indeed be possible to implement a GlkOte frontend. I’ve been meaning to write an interpreter in C, once the Å-machine specification feels stable enough, and for that I would definitely use Glk. I’ll look into GlkOte as a potential long-term option. Still, right now I think it’s probably less trouble to fix the outstanding issues with the current javascript frontend than to make a new one.
The short answer is that it would probably be equally messy. I’m not sure how it would improve performance. I know parchment does just-in-time transpilation; is that what you had in mind? I don’t think that technique would have a comparable impact on Dialog code, since there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between predicate queries and function calls.