In this test, I am going to be comparing Smarty (the most widely used PHP templating engine and an official PHP project), Blitz (a new templating engine currently under very active development that is native compiled as a PHP extension), and standard PHP includes.

He compares them on three different levels - instantiation, simple template rendering, and complex testing. Each time, there's a victor but in the end, there's really only one "winner" - the PHP language itself that does a great job of templating things easily without the overhead of adding in external libraries.

A coworker of mine found out about a project called Blitz. its a PHP extension that does templating. It will of course have one advantage over Smarty. Smarty is slow as its all written in PHP. PHP is slower than C and always will be. Its just life.

Tests were even done to compare it to several of the other popular templating frameworks currently offered.