What Is PhalconPHP?

PhalconPHP is an MVC framework for PHP written in C and supplied as a compiled PHP extension. This is what makes it one of the fastest frameworks available (to be completely honest the fastest one is Yaf, but it is a micro framework and has much, much more limited functionality than Phalcon). PhalconPHP doesn’t need any long operations with PHP files and it doesn’t need to be interpreted at every request—it’s loaded into RAM once when your web server is started and consumes very few resources.

MVC frameworks have been considered best practice in web development for a long time—by now it is a sort of a professional standard, so most web developers are familiar with at least one MVC framework for PHP: Symfony, Yii, Laravel, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, etc. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages, but what do they all have in common? All of them are written in PHP and consist of many included PHP files with a huge amount of logic that has to be run by the interpreter on every request, every single time your code runs. While this makes for great transparency, we pay with performance. Large amounts of code and lots of included files cost a great deal of memory and time, especially in PHP (since it’s interpreted, not compiled). Yes, the situation has become much better in PHP 7, but there is still lots to be improved, and PhalconPHP brings those improvements to the table.