Exploring an AST-Based Template Engine in PHP — Thoughts?

I’ve been exploring an idea and would really like to hear different perspectives on it. What if a PHP template engine (like Blade) moved from being string-based to an AST-driven pipeline (lexer → parser → AST), so it actually understands the structure of the template instead of just compiling it? The thought is that this could produce a tree representation of the view (some kind of server-side VDOM). With that, it might be possible to clearly separate static and dynamic parts based on AST analysis. In theory, instead of re-rendering the full HTML on every request, the server could work at a node level: identify which parts are dynamic track them as nodes in a tree and update only those parts when data changes Something conceptually similar to how virtual DOM works in frameworks like Vue, but driven from the server side. For example: dynamic variables could be detected at compile time certain values could be marked as “live” the browser could request only those live parts (e.g. via smal