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You might be interested in OMeta, whose goal is to make language experimentation quicker and more accessible by providing a kind of interface layer between a declarative grammar and a host language. I'm still reading the paper, so I can't vouch for it yet. But it's from VPRI and has Alan Kay's backing.[0]

[0] http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/

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I really enjoyed learning OMeta, and I'd recommend playing with it to others. However, the performance of the JavaScript implementation is really bad. It uses exceptions as a primary mechanism for control flow, which is not generally well optimized in JS. I observed a toy calculator grammar parsing a string about 20 characters long throw and catch hundreds of exceptions.

I've had good success with Jison as a JS parser generator that is performant enough to feel good about using in production.

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