Smarty is wonderful. Smarty is powerful. Smarty is REALLY REALLY slow. So slow, in fact, that I was looking around for a different template system that not only does everything Smarty does, but runs really fast as well. But there were none to be found. So I thought, “why not write my own?” I did, and came up with a very bare-bones template system. I tested it against about 10 others, and it was one of the fastest – the only ones that were faster had almost no functionality! It is this fast because it has almost no overhead – it only parses the file once (like Smarty), and doesn’t even have a class – just one function call for the entire template! The search for a name was a no-brainer – seeing this script work reminded me of the speed of lightning, so it is now called LightningRoD.