The new, faster runtime has been completed and is available from the download pages. It uses an interpreted approach utilising automatons instead of compiled java classes. Furthermore, the syntax has been considerably extended and TMPL now sports a declarative type system and tempalte references.
There is also a paper about the subject, please refer to http://www.edzard.net/media/tmpl_runtime.pdf
An initial checkin of TMPL compiler (alpha version) has been commited to CVS. Andreas is now working on the interpreted version.