Phalcon
High performance, full-stack PHP framework delivered as a C extension
...Developers do not need to know C to use Phalcon. Its functionality is exposed as PHP classes and interfaces under the Phalcon namespace, ready to be used. Zephir/C extensions are loaded together with PHP one time on the web server's daemon start process. Classes and functions provided by the extension are ready to use for any application. The code is compiled and isn't interpreted because it's already compiled to a specific platform and processor. Thanks to its low-level architecture and optimizations Phalcon provides the lowest overhead for MVC-based applications. ...