Hello everyone. Thanks to the input we received here, well, it’s been about 1 year since replacing ShimDandy with pomegranate for dependency resolution and classpath modification. Wow did that ever greatly accelerate rendering speed; where it used to be a second or two per template, it is now on the order of 10s of templates per second (on my system here).
Another major change is a blocks or includes -style mechanism so that for example HTML page templates can all include a common header and footer template. This makes it way closer in feel to other templating systems.
What is painful about this template system now, despite its huge utility, is understanding and remediating templating errors. You have to study the stack trace and make an educated guess about where in the template the problem is… That is definitely on the roadmap before version 1.0.
See CHANGELOG.md.