This is my second question on the site, like always, I\'ve spent several hours reading a lot of related questions, the 2 most relevant are:
The question is timely because last week we launched Saxon/C, a port of Saxon compiled to Intel machine code with APIs for C, C++, and PHP. It's early days yet (an Alpha 0.1 release), but if you don't mind being at the bleeding edge, you might give it a try. And of course we welcome your feedback. Details at http://www.saxonica.com/saxon-c/index.xml