Phalcon's big attraction is it's speed and performance over other PHP frameworks. I kind of wonder how PHP7 is going to effect everything. As I understand it, PHP7's speed increase is due to the fact that they have pretty much borrowed from HHVM (Hip Hop) and will be using JIT (Just In Time) compiling (eventually - in a future version). Rather than Phalcon being even faster on PHP7, it may infact loose it's speed advantage. I.e with PHP7 an app coded with CodeIgniter for example, may run just as fast as an app coded with Phalcon. On the other hand, if Phalcon still gets processed as native C it may remain slightly faster and more efficient, and with your non Phalcon methods processed through PHP7, it will speed them up, but the performance increase will be far less than it is now. Overall though, Phalcon itself will not be any faster on PHP7. How can it be? It's already executed as native C! Phalcon may have to concentrate less on it's "implimented as C" speed advantage, and concentrate more on improved, ground breaking functionality in order to stay in the hearts of PHP devs. What do you think the future holds? Can Phalcon still maintain a significant speed advantage in the future?
That's an interesting question and I imagine many of us are asking the same thing, but I think you may be overestimating the performance gains of PHP7. Zend did a performance test with Laravel and Zend Framework 2, and the performance increase seemed to be around 1.8x faster. Right now the difference in performance between Laravel and Phalcon is way bigger than that (if someone has the numbers please post it here). So I believe that Phalcon will still be considerably more performant than the rest. But I agree that chossing a framework under PHP7 may be less obvious. It will be interesting to know what the core developpers think of this.
According to what I have read, PHP7 currently out-performs HHVM, without JIT even being implemented yet. PHP7 has been designed with a view to implimenting JIT in a future release which will (suposedly) speed it up even more. I think things in the PHP world are about to become a whole lot more interesting. It's interesting to note that both HHVM (Facebook) and Zephir (Phalcon) have been picked up by the PHP project, and implimented into a version that is so important, that the proceeding version (6) has been skipped alltogether. This is very exciting, and I am very proud of Phalcon (having been here since early on). Phalcon forced open a door that no one knew existed, and has changed the face of the language it impliments. That is an accolade that 99.9% of software can not boast about. So massive respect to the community!
I wouldn't agree with: 'Phalcon forced open a door that no one knew existed'. Just like you use regular built-in PHP functions, so you can use Phalcon's functions. So the concept is not that new, pretty much. It is new comparing to other frameworks which reside on a file system, whilst Phalcon resides in memory just like the PHP binary itself.
Nevertheless, I'm very pleased to see such a vibrant community of PHP and Phalcon! I'm full time supporter for PHP to enter the mainstream 'enterprise' arena and large projects. And all the projects I did - folks from 'big ass' Java/Oracle world cannot imagine how it is possible to do it simple like that :)
One quote from people having hard time to support PHP7 on a low level (just like PhalconPHP):
Hope the PHP group can decide on what PHP7 actually is. They already added new syntax for 7.1 not found in 7.0.