[jnicklas]

1) I don't really see how it introduces any abstractions. The only thing we're doing is moving where event bindings are declared from the controller (or Backbone View) to the template. Other than that it's really pretty much the same.

4) I did a very dirty quick benmark. See http://pastie.org/3296683. This just inserts 1000 words into a <ul> in three different ways. With jQuery, by appending each item separately, with jQuery through string concatenation, and with Serenade. I tested this repeatedly with different numbers of words, in different orders and on different browsers.

jQuery with append is around 5x SLOWER than Serenade jQuery with an entire template is around an order of magnitude FASTER than Serenade

In other words, the difference in how jQuery is used is way bigger than the difference to using Serenade.

I then did another dirty benchmark: http://pastie.org/3296747. I've only added a primitive event binding so that clicking the <li>s pops open an alert. A really interesting thing happens. In IE (7,8,9), the difference shrinks to around a factor 5. So jQuery is 5x faster. In all other browsers I tested however, Serenade outperforms even the full string concatenation jQuery example by a slight margin.

I don't think this proves that Serenade is fast, but it's at least not deficiently slow.