Dries Buytaert wrote:
Indeed, that is exactly why I suggest creating it as a completely separate engine. Though as I think on it, the current setup doesn't support running the same theme with multiple engines, that I'm aware of. I'm not actually sure.
The point of my original e-mail is that for such a system to be successful, it needs to be default. If theme_ functions remain the default fallback mechanism, we don't get the full advantage (eg. the modules and memory footprint won't go down) making it a lot less attractive. In fact, things would get worse, as we'd need to duplicate the theme_ functions as stand-alone templates (eg. creating maintenance overhead).
I think there's a miscommunication; I was referring to a different engine that is a mirror of PHPTemplate, but does the compiling; I agree that the template structure needs to be default, and Adrian was pointing out that most of PHPTemplate can easily be pulled into core, and still leave the part that actually interprets the template to the engine. PHPTemplate would then, by itself, be very very short, since it'd just execute the templates. PHPTemplateCompiled (or whatever; this name is bad, but it's all I got right now) would be longer since it'd have to support a compile function and be able to bring in all of the templates that are used.