I love sculpin! I&#x27;m biased (I wrote the original getting started guide).<p>Modern PHP is one of the best places to be doing web development in 2015.<p>PHP has a huge external perception bias from how awful it was up to 2011, and it doesn&#x27;t help that 80% of PHP programmers you will run into are woefully unaware of modern PHP tools and techniques so they keep writing mangled messes.<p>Sculpin wraps the really nice templating engine Twig and you basically get all the features it provides, and the extensibility is really powerful. Sculpin let&#x27;s you leverage all the components and packages for templates, i18n and perhaps more complex use cases.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why you want speed for generation of static content but if that is a constraint... I doubt that you will find better performance in node or ruby over PHP5.6 or PHP7.<p>So... PHP has the features, speed, and packages. What&#x27;s the reason not to pick it? The syntax?