The Symfony blog has a new post about a change coming in the next version of the popular PHP framework - treating Twig as a first-class citizen. This update removes the abstraction layer that was introduced for it to be used in templating.

When I started to work on Symfony2, Twig didn't exist. Anyway, to ease using PHP as a templating engine, I created the Symfony Templating Component. Later on, not very satisfied with using PHP as a templating language, I decided to create a new templating language, Twig, based on the Python Jinja2 language. And Symfony2 became the first popular framework to adopt a non-PHP templating engine in core. [...] But what would Twig as a First-Class Citizen mean in Symfony2 then? To be able to support PHP and Twig in Symfony, we added an abstraction layer. [...] For Symfony 3.0, I'd like to extract the Templating Component into an independent library (for the few people using PHP with Symfony) but I'd also like for Twig to be front and center in the framework. The good news is that most of the work has already been done in Symfony 2.7.

He compares the two methods for using Twig, one in 2.6 and the other in 2.7, showing both the reduction in code needed and the overall speed improvement gained by removing the excess layer. He includes a link to the Blackfire.io reports showing the difference in the metrics with a total of 48 classes less to load just by removing this layer.